The Mystery and Meaning of Everett Ruess

“We did have some moments of beauty together, didn’t we?”

Those assuring yet wistful words were penned by a young man named Everett Ruess in 1934 in a farewell love letter to a girlfriend, several months before he disappeared somewhere in the desert of the American Southwest.

The line is quoted in the book Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of A Legendary Wilderness Explorer by David Roberts (Broadway Books, 2011) and serves as a poignant reminder of what matters most in life.

Everett was born on March 28, 1914, to Stella and Christopher Ruess, intellectual parents who possessed a literary bent that welcomed strong and independent thought. At an early age Everett and his older brother Waldo (named after the poet/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson) were encouraged to keep their own diaries and probe deep, philosophical questions. Almost from the beginning, it seems, Everett was destined to walk a different path.

By the time he graduated high school the country was limping along in the midst of the Great Depression; options and opportunities were few and far between for men of his age. But he had the chance to go to college, attending UCLA for one semester before something inside told him that wasn’t what he wanted to do.

He dropped out and began taking off by himself on solo travels through the tall canyons and vast mesas of California and Utah. By the time he turned 20 he was a self-declared wanderer and explorer, as well as an aspiring artist, poet, and nature writer who in his letters and journals showed introspective depth and creative promise well beyond his years.

As he saw it, being an artist was all about searching for truth and meaning in the world. By 1934 he was all but obsessed with the idea of going on a journey, a quest, to challenge himself physically and mentally like never before. For that he turned to the beauty and danger of the desert.

He bought two pack mules and set out for the rugged lands in and around Navajo country of Arizona, armed with little more than his painting kit, a writing journal, and the carefree hubris only youth can provide. As for food and provisions, he packed what he could, which wasn’t much. He would worry about that later.

The desert became his home as he hiked, climbed and slept in the dirt under the stars in one canyon after another, reveling in the solitude and freedom from city life. Yet still his adolescent angst showed through as his diaries spoke often of melancholy desires to find a special companion to share his life with. That, along with his devotion to pushing the limits and writing and painting pictures of nature, were constant themes in his journals and letters.

Every so often Ruess would pass through a small town or village where he would find a local post office to send out correspondence to family, friends, and the aforementioned girl of his dreams, Frances. (Exactly who she was or how he met her remains a mystery.)

The last known letter Everett wrote was to his brother and was dated November 11, 1934. It included the following declaration:

As to when I shall visit civilization; it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time...Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me?

As the months rolled into 1935 the letters stopped coming. His parents grew alarmed and organized horseback search parties, but by then they already feared time and the vast desert spaces were working against them. Hopes were raised when Everett’s two mules were recovered healthy and unharmed in the middle of a canyon. But as for Everett Rues, no trace of him was ever found.

To this day many theories have been put forth as to his fate – everything from being ambushed and murdered by area cattle rustlers to his committing suicide by drowning in the Colorado River. Others speculate that he took a Navajo bride and lived the rest of his life in private seclusion.

What makes this all the more unsettling these many years later is the fact that the writing that survived him occasionally spoke of a dark and foreboding awareness of things to come.

From a poem he titled “The Wilderness Song”:

Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary;

That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun;

Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases;

Lonely and wet and cold…but that I kept my dream!

To an earlier letter to his brother:

“I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.”

If any of this rings a bell, it may be because the story of Everett Ruess is eerily similar to that of another romantic nomad, one who would die alone in the wilderness of Alaska some sixty years later — Christopher McCandless, memorialized in the bestselling book and film adaptation Into the Wild.

Like Ruess, McCandless was young and idealistic, fancying himself a free spirit unbound by caution or anyone else’s expectations, only to meet with tragic results in the end. For both men a curious fascination has grown up around their story, based in no small part on the few but soulful words they left behind.

Did Everett Ruess find whatever it was he was looking for? Did he pay the ultimate price to do so? No one knows. But as evidenced by one line in a love letter to an unknown woman, maybe he did find his answer, not in the wilds of nature but within himself. In the midst of it all, the doubt, the pain, the loss, there are still moments of beauty in this world to be found and cherished forever.

“We did have some moments of beauty together, didn’t we?”

Such is wisdom. And the price we pay for it.

A Funny Little War Story

For as long as soldiers have gone to war, which is to say as long as history has been recorded, they have tucked away countless charms and talismans in their pockets and uniforms before heading into battle. From love letters and photos of sweethearts to Bibles and pendants of every known faith and creed, men at war have carried anything and everything to give them what they needed most – hope for another day.

Author and novelist Tim O'Brien knew only too well the power in these trinkets and talismans. He was 22 years old when he was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam, where he served in the 3^rd Platoon, Company A, 5^th Battalion of the 46^th Infantry Regiment from 1968 through 1970.

In his semi-autobiographical novel The Things They Carried, he focuses on the real and symbolic burdens American soldiers carried with them every day in the jungle heat and tall grass. The weapons they would one day leave behind, the scars and memories would stay at their sides for the rest of their lives.

Not long ago I discovered an interesting memento another war veteran carried into battle. Alonzo Miller volunteered for duty in 1863 and served in Company A, 12^th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment of Blair’s 17^th Army Corps. Over the next two years of the Civil War, he fought in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, the Battle of Atlanta, the Savannah Campaign, and the Campaign of the Carolinas, wounded twice before being honorably discharged at war’s end.

Miller carried with him a ‘Daily Miniature Diary’ for each year he served, each book small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, or the shirt pocket of a Union infantry soldier. He faithfully filled every inch of every page of those books, recording the daily events in fine pencil, each word crammed together like soldiers on parade march.

Alonzo was 25 years old in 1864. Throughout that year he described plainly but honestly a life that any veteran of any war would understand. The endless marching (often 12 to 15 miles a day down the dirt roads of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia), the lousy food, the common boredom and uncommon camaraderie of life amongst brothers in an army camp. 

And, yes, the deadly scenes of battle, such as this from a skirmish that took place on June 15, 1864 somewhere in Georgia: “It was awful. We jumped the breastworks, formed a line single file, and started on doublequick for the Rebs. They fired—it was like hailstones for a while. One was shot through the thigh, of our company. I was the third man from our Captain and the first one that fired. It was awful, bullets came thick and fast. I did not expect to get out alive.”

Worn down and weary, Miller’s entry a few weeks later said simply: “If I only am spared my life, that will be all I ask.”                                                                                                              

But what intrigued me even more was what I found tucked away in a back pouch of his 1864 diary. It was a newspaper clipping, one column, ten inches in length, neatly cut out and folded up, the paper itself brown and brittle as ancient parchment. No date. No author. Not even the name of the newspaper to which it once belonged. Right away I start thinking this is going to be some kind of life and death wisdom, or story of faith and family, that the man obviously cherished and carried with him always.

Well, not exactly.

Entitled A Dutchman's Complaint, it was a short piece of satire, maybe a thousand words in length. The story is told in first person narrative by a fifty-year-old character with the outlandish name of Gottlieb Klobberyoss. Right away one sees the intended parody of dialect and demeanor when Herr Klobberyoss stands in the local saloon, slurping down another drink, when he says:          

"I dinks much about da war. Und da draft, und da rebils, and all about dese dings. I dinks about 'em more as about anyding else….De odder day begins de draft. Dat bodders me agin…So ven I gets tired mit drinkin on my own stoop, I goes down to Hans Butterfoos's tavern, und I drinks dere, und I tells my opinion."                                                       

True to his word, he goes to the tavern and drinks some more and offers more unflattering opinions of “rebil sojers” and Confederate President “Sheff Davis.”

The story reaches a conclusion that is none too dramatic or humorous, at least not by this reader. I’ve read the story several times and still can’t say what the punch line is. Maybe there isn’t one.

But the mystery here, the real story, is what it was about this farcical conversation that made Alonzo Miller think it important enough to carry with him every single day, when any one of those days could have been his last?  

No one can answer that now. Maybe he pulled it out and read it whenever the dull life of an infantryman overtook him. Maybe it reminded him that there was still a world of humor and life outside of war. Or maybe he just needed a chuckle now and then - understandable enough given the circumstances surrounding him at the time.

Whatever the reason was, it worked. Alonzo Miller’s luck held out, and after the war he went back home to Prescott, Wisconsin, where he started up a small farm, married, and raised a daughter. Whether or not a pious and penitent man, he also served for many years as the janitor of the local Methodist church. He ended up living for another fifty years before passing away peacefully in 1917 at the age of 78.

His daughter, Mary Angeline, would live the rest of her life in Prescott and never marry. Upon her death in 1938 she had her estate settled by a woman named Fay Stolt – my paternal grandmother. Fay would eventually pass along Alonzo’s diaries to my father. Because of those diaries Clarence Stolt became a bonafide Civil War history buff, collecting the personal papers of Alonzo Miller and presenting lectures about his life to several Wisconsin civic organizations. After his death I became the caretaker of Alonzo Miller’s war diaries, and now I’m doing my part to carry on the legacy.

Because while the men who once wrote and read the words on that tiny scrap of paper are long gone and forgotten, it is the story that still remains. The tale of A Dutchman’s Complaint has outlived that war and the men who fought it by a century and a half.

Maybe that makes this a funny little war story after all. 

Alonzo Miller