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- Everett Ruess mystery
- Oct 21:
- Family says remains not those of Everett Ruess
- Jul 1:
- Utah scientists question Everett Ruess DNA findings
A team of geneticists at the University of Colorado in Boulder this year compared 600,000 genetic markers to prove that a pile of bones found in a small crevice near Comb Ridge in southeast Utah belonged to artist and romantic vagabond Everett Ruess.
The first public forum gathered since that find, however, showed that the mystery and allure behind the legendary figure has not cooled at all.
Almost every seat in the University of Utah's Orson Spencer Hall Auditorium was filled Monday night to hear experts narrate their firsthand accounts of the astounding find. The forum also included a niece and nephew of Ruess who disappeared into the southern Utah wilderness more than 75 years ago: Michele and Brian Ruess.
Denny Bellson, a member of the Navajo Nation who found the site containing the bones last summer, also traveled from Shiprock, N.M., to enjoy his newfound fame. "I try to hide out on the 'res,'" he said. "Everyone's looking for me now. I'm a little nervous."
Including questions from the audience toward the end, the two-hour forum hosted by the Glen Canyon Institute ranged far and wide over Ruess' legacy, constituting a conversational wake of sorts for the 20-year-old California native.
Last seen near Escalante, Utah, in 1934, Ruess' journal entries and art gradually caught the attention of such luminaries as Wallace Stegner and, years later, Jon Krakauer, who reserved an entire chapter for Ruess in "Into the Wild," about Christopher McCandless' similar disappearance into the Alaskan wilderness. Michele Ruess shared with the lecture crowd never before seen photographs of her late uncle as a young infant, as well as slides of Ruess' watercolors and artwork. She also placated criticisms against the family for cremating Ruess' remains and scattering them along the Pacific, rather than burying them in southern Utah, by reading a poem Ruess penned as a teenager: "My soul hurls outward, to the sea," he wrote.
An April/May article in National Geographic Adventure by David Roberts, also in attendance at Monday's forum, recounted how Bellson embarked on a search for Ruess' remains after his sister said their grandfather, Aneth Nez, told her about the murder of a young white man by three Ute Indians. Nez witnessed the killing from afar while walking the area in the 1930s.
Nez told his granddaughter, Daisy Johnson, of how he then buried the young man after his attackers left him for dead. When Nez became ill years later, a Navajo medicine man told him it was because he disturbed the grave. A curing ceremony using a lock of hair would cure Nez, the medicine man said. With his sister ill from cancer years later, Bellson
The Boulder forensic anthropologists in association with National Geographic recreated a skull using bone fragments found at the site, but Brian Ruess said Monday the family was not convinced of the find until extensive DNA tests proved the remains belonged to their late uncle.
Brian Ruess said he felt it was no mistake that Bellson's respect for Navajo oral tradition, and concern for his sister, led to the discovery. "I'd like to think that only that kind of noble pursuit would find Everett," he said.
Forum members said at least two mysteries concerning the legendary figure will endure: how he managed to traverse miles of rugged country between Escalante and Comb Ridge without burros, and why he decided to go there.
"All I can conclude is that he wanted to be Jules Verne ... and disappear," said W.L. "Bud" Rusho, author of the Ruess biography A Vagabond for Beauty , making a reference to Ruess' favorite pseudonym, "Nemo."
Brian Ruess said neither the family nor those who helped unearth Ruess' remains will divulge the location of the crevice where Bellson's grandfather buried the lone wanderer, as it's located on Navajo land.
"We do not want this site turned into a shrine," Ruess said, referring to what happened to the Alaska location where his late uncle's modern-day counterpart, McCandless, died. "It would be a grievous injustice to the Navajo Nation."
