While not related to Lewis and Clark, I think that you might find the following story interesting. It strikes a chord with me because I have been reading some Tony Hillerman novels lately and have become a bit fascinated by the be Navajo culture and traditions, particularly their beliefs surrounding the dead.
A Mystery of the West Is Solved
By KIRK JOHNSON
New York Times
May 1, 2009
DENVER — The gifted young idealist who slips the bonds of civilization and prevails against the wild, or fails in the trying is a recurring theme of the American West — not to mention Hollywood.
Everett Ruess in many ways defined the template. A poet, painter and confident to a leathery set of Western artists in the 1930’s, from Dorothea Lange to Ansel Adams, the 20-year-old Mr. Ruess rode off into the desert southwest in 1934 with two burros and a notebook full of dreams, never to be seen again. For 75 years, the West became tamer, but Mr. Ruess and his legend did not, and the lingering mystery of his disappearance only added to the romantic aura of the time, and fueled the periodic search for evidence of his fate.
Now the circle has been closed with a tale that is gritty and grim — and scientifically gee-whiz at the same time.
Human remains were found last year by a Navajo man near the town of Escalante, Utah. He knew nothing of the Ruess saga, but was looking for evidence of a murder that his grandfather had witnessed during the bleak years of the Great Depression. On Thursday, researchers at the University of Colorado said that DNA in the remains that the Navajo man found matched that of living Ruess relatives. Citing the DNA evidence, as well as a forensic facial reconstruction, which was compared with photographs of Mr. Ruess, the researchers concluded that the remains were those of the long-lost artist.
So it was that two family stories of secrets and mysteries became intertwined, and then resolved.
“Navajo oral tradition, the forensic analysis and now the DNA test,” said Dennis Van Gerven, professor of anthropology at the university. “We can be certain that this is Ruess.”
But the story, pieced together in the April/May issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine, and announced at a conference call, probably still leaves enough loose ends to keep Ruess-flame-keepers at work.
The resonant sentence Mr. Ruess wrote in a letter to his family before heading out in November 1934 will likely live on as well: “As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think,” he wrote, as quoted in the book, “Sandstone Sunsets: In Search of Everett Ruess,” by Mark A. Taylor (Gibbs Smith 1997). “I prefer the saddle to the street-car, the star-sprinkled sky to a roof,” Mr. Ruess wrote.
In their analysis, the Colorado, researchers said the preliminary evidence was circumstantial; the bones confirmed that the body was male, Caucasian, somewhere between 19 and 22 years old, and about 5 feet 8 inches tall — all a match for Mr. Ruess. Bone fragments from the jaw and eye sockets were largely intact, and so a facial reconstruction came next. It closely matched photographs of Mr. Ruess taken by Ms. Lange, a photographer probably best known for her images of migrant workers during the Great Depression.
Finally, DNA extracted from the bones showed a 25 percent match with surviving nephews and nieces of Mr. Ruess, the exact amount that would be expected in that family relationship. The conclusion, said Kenneth Krauter, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the university, was “irrefutable.”
How the body was found at all is an astonishing tale in its own right.
That story begins in the early 1970’s, when Aneth Nez broke a 37-year-silence to tell his family about a dark incident in the 1930’s, when he’d seen, while sitting on a ridge top, three Ute boys chase down and murder a young white man. The killers took the victim’s two mules, and Mr. Nez told his granddaughter, Daisy Johnson, how he’d then buried the body, to give it respect and keep it from being eaten by coyotes, but had been too afraid ever to talk about it.
Last year Ms. Johnson told her younger brother, Denny Bellson, the story, and together, on May 25, they went to the general area their grandfather had talked about. Mr. Bellson, speaking in the conference call, said he first saw a saddle — probably he thinks, his grandfather’s, disposed of because in the Navajo tradition it had been contaminated by contact with the blood of the dead — then the bones, jammed down into a rock crevice.
“The skull was in pieces,” he said. But he said he also saw that it was indented, as though caved in, which fit with his grandfather’s tale.
One of Mr. Ruess’s nephews, Brian Ruess, said in a telephone interview that he grew up with open-ended versions of the story of his uncle, with each family member encouraged to speculate. Some wanted to think he had fallen in love in a Navajo girl, and intentially disappeared into the desert. Brian Ruess said he himself always imagined his uncle swept away while crossing the Colorado River, the body lost downriver.
But if even if that old family parlor debate is settled, he said, the larger question of what Mr. Ruess should be remembered for remains up for grabs.
“Everett’s story is more important than just his disappearance — his message wasn’t to go disappear,” he said. “I think the message to be found in his life and writing and art — that there’s beauty in the wilderness and beauty in adventure, and go seek adventure, go live your wanderlust,” said Mr. Ruess, 44, who works in software sales in Portland.
And what happened to Mr. Ruess’s gear and notebook, and the bulky box camera that was carried by one of his burros? Much is still unknown.
Was the campsite discovered in 1957 on a high plateau by geologists working on the Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado River — spoons and cups set on rocks as though someone had just stepped way for a moment, set around a fire ring and a box of razor blades from a Los Angeles drug store located in the 1930’s near the Ruess family home in Los Angeles — evidence of Mr. Ruess’s last night on earth, as some researchers have long believed? It’s a question the National Geographic article does not address. So it may be a piece of someone else’s desert mystery, still waiting to be solved.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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