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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