The vast bulk of the surviving manuscripts of original writings by Everett Ruess is archived in the Ruess Family Papers collection in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. That collection also contains many writings by and documents pertaining to other members of the Ruess family, especially Everett’s brother, Waldo. And the collection holds the original copies of the richly detailed 1932 and 1933 diaries that Everett kept during his long journeys through the Southwest and California. However, the diaries from his 1930 and 1931 excursions have gone missing, perhaps forever. And the 1934 diary—which Waldo believed would contain the fullest and most mature of all his brother’s musings on life—disappeared with the wanderer after November 1934.
On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, first published in 1940 and still in print in a slightly different format, gathers together a miscellany of excerpts from Everett’s essays, letters, and diaries, as well as reproductions of some of his best watercolor paintings and blockprints. The 2000 commemorative edition adds a thoughtful epilogue by W. L. (Bud) Rusho, titled “Everett Ruess and His Footprints,” as well as a provocative essay by Gary James Bergera, titled “ ‘The Murderous Pain of Living’: Thoughts on the Death of Everett Ruess.”
Until now, the best source for Everett’s writings, as well as the book that launched the Ruess cult, was Rusho’s 1983 compendium, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty. In 1998 Rusho published Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess, which transcribes the 1932 and 1933 diaries. In 2002, Rusho brought out a combined edition of Vagabond and Wilderness Journals that also printed many hitherto unknown photographs of Everett and his family, ranging from his childhood through his last year. And in 2010, Rusho republished the combined edition under a new title, The Mystery of Everett Ruess, appending to the previous texts a short afterword covering the controversy aroused by our findings at the grave site on Comb Ridge.
Rusho’s books, however, are vitiated by his practice of silently omitting passages, some of them fairly lengthy, from both the letters and the diaries, a practice he has never publicly explained. Even more maddeningly, through no fault of Rusho’s, some of the letters he had at hand in 1983 and published in Vagabond have since gone missing. No one in the family or involved in the publishing of the books seems to know what may have happened to such important documents as the letters to Frances, possibly the only love of Everett’s short life.
There is no doubt that many original works by Everett lie in private hands today, but whether they will ever find their way to museums or libraries remains very much in doubt. The doleful history of the Larry Kellner “collection” recounted in this book is only the most egregious example of such unacknowledged hoarding.
The Utah State Historical Society contains the extensive papers of Harry LeRoy Aleson, one of the most dogged sleuths who ever tried to solve the mystery of Everett’s fate. Wallace Stegner’s early and perceptive essay about Everett, “Artist in Residence,” is found in the pages of his Mormon Country. Edward Abbey’s sonnet mystically evoking Everett as “hunter, brother, companion of our days” appears as an afterword to Rusho’s Vagabond. Copies of some of Everett’s best blockprints, as well as other memorabilia, can be purchased through Steve Jerman at the website http://everettruess.net/. Nathan Thompson’s unpublished master’s thesis linking Everett with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) was submitted to the faculty of the Department of Communications at Brigham Young University in 2003.
My own pair of articles about Everett appeared in the Spring 1999 and the April/May 2009 issues of National Geographic Adventure. In addition, my short explanation of how the DNA testing at the University of Colorado produced an erroneous result can be found online at ngadventure.com.
Much of the research I conducted for this book was in the form of personal interviews and e-mail correspondence. (The acknowledgments name most of my sources for such insights and information.) For the background of the town of Escalante in the 1930s, I relied on a number of privately printed and rather obscure local history books, including Jerry C. Roundy’s “Advised Them to Call the Place Escalante,” Fay L. Alvey’s “Damn Silliness,” Nethella Griffin Woolsey’s The Escalante Story, and DeLane Griffin’s priceless personal scrapbook of his life as a rancher on the Escalante Desert and Kaiparowits Plateau. For documents about cattle rustling in the Escalante area, I consulted records kept at the Garfield County courthouse in Panguitch, Utah.
Ultimately, the most important source for this book was the landscape itself. The countless hours I spent hunting on the ground for clues to Everett’s demise, or retracing segments of his journeys on foot, gave me at least as visceral an understanding of his passion for the wilderness as the equivalent amount of time I spent poking through books and libraries. On canyon rims and desert plateaus, I felt that I had come as close as I ever could to finding Everett Ruess.