For 75 years the disappearance of Everett Ruess has posed one of the greatest mysteries in the annals of adventure. Now, a skeleton in the desert, a navajo tale of murder, and a battery of genetic and forensic analyses may finally put the legend to rest.
Text by David Roberts
Photographs: Everett Ruess, in a previously unpublished 1933 portait by Dorothea Lange. Utah's Comb Ridge; Denny Bellson and Daisy Johnson; archaeologist Ron Maldonado by Dawn Kish (3).
Editor's Note: The DNA results are now in and confirm that the skeleton is Everett Ruess.
DNA results identify the body of 20-year-old Everett Ruess
NEW YORK—In a joint announcement today with National Geographic ADVENTURE magazine, researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder released the results of a DNA test that positively identifies the remains of famed explorer and artist Everett Ruess, who disappeared in 1934, solving a mystery that has baffled law enforcement for more than 75 years.
Dr. Kenneth Krauter, professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, presented test results that compared the DNA of a femur found in the Utah desert to saliva samples taken from four of Ruess's nieces and nephews, the closest living relatives. The test examined the inheritance of some 600,000 markers using gene chips from the Affymetrix Corporation and found that the saliva samples and the DNA extracted from the femur share approximately 25 percent of those markers by inheritance. Nieces and nephews are expected to hold about one-quarter of their genetic markers in common with an aunt or uncle. The test provides essentially irrefutable evidence of a close blood relationship between the Ruess family DNA and the bone DNA. Subsequent tests comparing the bone DNA with 50 unrelated people confirmed the results, with considerably less than 1 percent of markers shared in this way.
"This was a textbook case," said Krauter. "We had a large number of markers and, when comparing the bone DNA and the Ruess samples, the mode of inheritance of those markers was exactly what you'd expect for the relationship between an uncle and a niece or nephew."
The DNA confirmation is the capstone of a yearlong investigation by National Geographic ADVENTURE magazine and its contributing editor David Roberts. Ruess, a writer, artist, and icon of the American Southwest, was last seen near Davis Gulch in Utah in 1934. Since his disappearance, at age 20, scores of searchers have canvassed the area, and his legend has grown to rival that of other lost American explorers, such as Amelia Earhart. In 1942 author Wallace Stegner took measure of Ruess, comparing him to a young John Muir, and in 1996 Jon Krakauer devoted 10 pages of Into the Wild to Ruess. The complete story of Ruess, his disappearance and the discovery of his gravesite appears in the April/May 2009 issue of National Geographic ADVENTURE, currently on newsstands.
The key to breaking the case came from an unlikely source: Denny Bellson, a traditional Navajo, who was unaware of the Ruess mystery prior to helping to solve it. In May 2008 Bellson's sister, Daisy Johnson, relayed a story her grandfather had told her of a young Anglo who was murdered in the Utah desert. Bellson found the site soon after.
The grave was excavated by Ron Maldonado, the Navajo Nation's supervisory archaeologist, and—with permission from the family—the remains were handed off to forensic anthropologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The anthropologists, Dr. Dennis Van Gerven, professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and his graduate student assistant, Paul Sandberg, used fragments of skeleton to create a biological profile of the victim.
"The shape of the pelvis told us that the individual was male," Sandberg reports in the April/May issue of National Geographic ADVENTURE. "The degree of developmental maturity of the bones told us that he was between the ages of 19 and 22."
The anthropologists stabilized the fragile bone pieces, which were sun-bleached and eroded after decades of exposure, and painstakingly rebuilt a portion of the skull. They then superimposed an image of the remade skull on photographs of Everett Ruess taken in 1933, shortly before his disappearance. "The bones match the photo in every last detail," Van Gerven said after finishing the analysis. "Even down to the spacing between his teeth."
The results of the DNA test not only confirm the forensic work of Van Gerven and Sandberg but validate Navajo oral tradition. "If this were going before a court of law, you'd want to build a case," said Van Gerven. "That’s what we've done here, with Navajo oral tradition, the forensic analysis and now the DNA test. We can be certain that this is Ruess."
The investigative team also included Matt McQueen, assistant professor, Institute of Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado at Boulder; and Helen Marshall, research assistant, molecular, cellular and developmental biology, University of Colorado at Boulder.
It was a chilly day in November 1934. The country had been mired in the Great Depression for more than five years, and no town felt the pinch of poverty more acutely than Escalante. Founded by Mormon pioneers 59 years earlier, the small settlement in southern Utah—then one of the most remote towns in the United States—had been stricken in successive summers by a plague of grasshoppers that ruined the crops and by the worst drought in nearly eight decades. In late autumn, the arrival of any visitor in Escalante was a rare occurrence. It was all the more surprising, then, when the thin, sandy-haired stranger rode into town from the west, saddled on one undersized burro, leading another that was packed with camping gear. His name, he told the locals, was Everett Ruess. He was from California. And although he was only 20, he had been wandering all over the Southwest for the better part of the previous four years.
The young boys of Escalante took an instant liking to the vagabond. During the next several days, they rode horseback with him along the nearby ridges, hunted for arrowheads, and shared his campfire dinner of venison and potatoes. On his last night in town, Ruess (pronounced roo-ess) treated a couple of the boys to the local movie theater. They watched Death Takes a Holiday.
Then Ruess rode alone out of town, headed southeast down the Hole in the Rock Trail toward the barren plateau the locals called the Desert. The day before, he had mailed a last letter to his brother in California. "It may be a month or two before I have a post office," he wrote, "for I am exploring southward to the Colorado [River], where no one lives."
Ruess was launched on the next leg of his quest for beauty and adventure. A week later, 50 miles out, he sat around a campfire with a couple of Escalante sheepherders.
And then, Everett Ruess disappeared from the face of the Earth.
It was a warm day in May 2008. Daisy Johnson had come from her home in Farmington, New Mexico, to Shiprock to visit her younger brother, Denny Bellson. And to tell him a story he had never heard before—a story about their grandfather, Aneth Nez, that took place back in the 1930s.
Fifty-six years old last May, Johnson was a troubled woman. A year before, she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She underwent a round of chemotherapy that nauseated her and caused her hair to fall out, but the cancer had gone away. Now, just in the past few weeks, it had come back. This time Johnson, a traditional Navajo, went to a medicine man.
"He told me this all came about because of our grandpa," Johnson said to her brother. She knew in a heartbeat that the medicine man must be right. How else had he known about her grandfather?
Bellson lives on the Navajo Reservation, just off U.S. Highway 191, not far from where he and his sister had grown up, and where their grandfather, Aneth Nez, had lived. Last May he listened to his sister’s story in electrified silence.
"A long time ago," she said, "Grandpa was sitting up there on the rim of Comb Ridge [a sandstone uplift that crosses the Utah-Arizona border]. For several days he watched this guy—he was a real young Anglo dude—riding up and down the canyon below him. The guy had two mules, one that he rode and one that was packed with things dangling off the side. It was like he was looking for something."
One day, according to Johnson, Nez saw the young man down in the riverbed, only this time he was yelling and riding fast. Nez scanned the wash below and saw three Utes chasing the boy. "They caught up with him and hit him on the head and knocked him off his mule," she recounted. "They left him there and took off with the mules and whatever else the guy had."
As he watched the scene unfold, Nez stayed out of view. For centuries Utes living north of the San Juan River had been fierce enemies of the Navajo, whose homeland lay south of the river. As late as the 1930s, tensions between the groups occasionally broke out in violence. Nez’s perch was only a few miles from that ethnic frontier.
When the Utes had gone, Nez descended some 300 feet from Comb Ridge to the bed of Chinle Wash. The young man was dead by the time Nez got to him. Rather than looking for a burial site in the open wash, the Navajo hauled the body up to the rocky folds of the ridge, in all likelihood on the back of his horse. "Grandpa got a lot of blood on him," Johnson said. "That’s what made him get sick later. Then he buried the young guy up there on the rim."
For more than three decades, Aneth Nez had told no one about this dark episode in his past. Then, in 1971, at the age of 72, he also had fallen ill with cancer. Nez paid a medicine man to diagnose his trouble. "He said," Daisy Johnson recalled, "‘You had no business messing around with that body.’"
The medicine man told Nez that the only way he could cure his cancer would be to retrieve a lock of hair from the head of the young man he had buried decades earlier, then use it in a five-day curing ceremony. "I was 19," Johnson said. "I was home for the summer. That was the first time I ever heard anything about the young dude the Utes had killed down there in Chinle Wash."
Johnson drove Nez out toward the Comb in a pickup. She waited in the cab for two hours, guessing that her grandfather was reconnoitering the land or perhaps even praying to prepare himself. He returned to the pickup empty-handed.
Later, Nez traveled back to the Comb with a medicine man. This time he retrieved a lock of hair from the grave. In the curing ceremony, Johnson said, the medicine man dusted the hair with ashes—"so it will never bother the patient again." At the end of the five days, the medicine man shot the lock with a gun, to destroy it completely.
"And then Grandpa got better," Daisy Johnson said. "He lived another ten years."
As he listened to her story, Bellson realized that the grave must lie not far from the house he had built in 1993. Thirteen years younger than his sister, Bellson has kept a close bond with the land on which he grew up. Now he was seized with a passion to find the grave where Nez had buried the "young dude" back in the 1930s.
Several weeks later, Bellson drove to Farmington to see his sister. He brought with him a USGS topo map. "I tried to get her to show me where she’d parked the pickup with our grandpa," Bellson told me later. "When I showed her the map, she recognized a Y in the road near Colored Rock Woman’s house. She gave me real good directions."
During the next few weeks, Bellson, a carpenter and craftsman, spent his free time out hiking Comb Ridge, looking into every corner and crack along the rim. Then, one day, in an obscure crevice just under the crest of the Comb, he found a grave. Bellson saw at once that the person whose bones lay in that unlikely tomb had been buried in haste, and perhaps in great fear. A traditional Navajo himself, Bellson did not touch a thing.
When he got home, he called Johnson. "I found the grave," he told her.
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