After Tom Maugh's story on the apparent resolution of Everett Ruess' disappearance, I thought it would be interesting to go through the archives. Here's what I found: 

Loving the Land That Engulfed Him

New Interest in Young Man Who Vanished 53 Years Ago

March 15, 1987

By ANN JAPENGA, Times Staff Writer

May many another youth be by me inspired to leave the smug safety of his rut and follow fortune to other lands.

–Everett Ruess, writing at age 19

Amid
the arrests and auto thefts reported in the Los Angeles Police
Department bulletin for Sept. 4, 1935, one item seems out of place.
It's too romantic, too mysterious to belong on a police ledger. It
seems better suited to a novel by Zane Grey:

A Los Angeles youth
leaves his family's home to paint landscapes and explore Indian caves
and cliff dwellings in southern Utah. The boy befriends Indians in
remote villages and learns to walk like an Indian, and to speak the
Navajo language. He travels with a couple of burros whose saddlebags
are decorated with colorful Indian designs.

The Lone Clue

Then
the boy vanishes. He is seen last by a sheepherder on Nov. 19, 1934.
Four months later his burros are found in a place called Davis Gulch. A
lone clue to the mysterious disappearance of Everett Ruess is the word
NEMO, scratched on the cliffs alongside Indian pictographs near where
the burros were discovered.

 Nemo, as adventure fans know, is the
name of the captain in Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea," a favorite novel of Ruess'. Nemo, Latin for "no one," escaped
humdrum civilization in a submarine.

And fleeing civilization is
just what the missing boy seemed to have done. Nothing has ever been
found of him but his burros and a couple of dusty footprints.

The
police bulletin has yellowed in the last half century, but Everett
Ruess' story has acquired new life. Ruess' older brother, Waldo, who
lives in Santa Barbara with his wife of 29 years, said that Everett's
name is becoming legend in the West. Waldo Ruess, 77, has heard many
accounts of people who have been inspired to adventures of their own
after hearing the tale of Everett Ruess.

Solo Wilderness Journey

A
26-year-old Fort Collins, Colo., college student, Judy Perkins, is
currently on a year's solo wilderness journey, following the route of
Ruess. New Mexico writer Marc Simmons also set out to explore the Utah
canyon country on a long-earred burro named Taco after reading Ruess'
letters home.

The letters were recently published by Peregrine
Smith Books in a volume called "Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty."
(The $9.95 paperback is available in bookstores or from the publisher
at P.O. Box 667, Layton, Utah 84041.) Peregrine president Gibbs Smith
said that many readers have written to say how much Ruess means to them.

What
accounts for the growing popularity of this long-vanished youth? "He
kept his dream," Waldo Ruess said. "Most of us go lock-step through the
decades, talking about what we'd like to do and never doing it."

Frank
Cook of Peregrine Smith Books said Everett Ruess represents "that
special spirit which exists in all of us but which few have the courage
or opportunity to express."

Gibbs Smith discovered Ruess'
writing in a 1940 volume, "On Desert Trails," that has been long out of
print. Smith, along with veteran river-runner Ken Sleight and W. L.
Rusho, who compiled the recent edition of letters, pieced together
Ruess' story by visiting the towns and campsites he had written about.

Sleight,
who lives in Escalante, Utah, said Ruess' tale has been told around
campfires for 50 years. Sleight first heard the saga from an old
river-runner, and has since passed on the mystery to tourists who ride
the rapids with him. Sleight said he identifies with Ruess' "wanting to
be out, to escape from civilization.

"Those that I meet down on
the river and the trails, they all know the story of Everett Ruess," he
said. "And no doubt about it, there are still a lot of people looking
for him."

Different Stories

There is little agreement
about what happened to Everett Ruess. Waldo Ruess thinks his brother
was killed by cattle rustlers who were known to hide out in the
canyons. Sleight thinks he might have drowned while trying to cross a
river on his way to rendezvous with a Navajo girlfriend. Others think
he fell off a cliff and was killed–although this is unlikely since
neither his body nor his paints and other supplies were ever found.

Still
others–those people Sleight refers to who are still looking for
Ruess–think he didn't die, but disappeared intentionally. His letters
are studded with references to disappearance. The message is so clear
that it's difficult to dismiss it as a young man's tendency toward
melodrama–which Ruess certainly was guilty of at times. There are
numerous passages like this one:

I must pack my short life full
of interesting events and creative activity. Then, and before physical
deterioration obtrudes, I shall go on some last wilderness trip to a
place I have known and loved. I shall not return.

Ruess' life
and letters seem calculated; it's almost as if he intended to serve as
an example to anyone who's ever felt trapped or bored by routine. By
disappearing, he might have wanted to ensure that his bold image would
never grow old or ordinary. In his letters to his family in Los
Angeles, he was constantly goading them to consider if they could say,
as he did, "I have really lived."

He swore that he would follow beauty no matter what it cost: "I have gone my way regardless of everything but beauty."

It
was a value learned from his mother, formerly an art teacher in the
Alhambra city schools and the daughter of an early California pioneer,
William Henry Knight. Stella Knight Ruess was an artist and poet who
published several books of block prints depicting Southern California
scenes.

His father, Christopher Ruess, was more prosaic. At the
time Everett vanished, his father was working for the Los Angeles
County Probation Department.

Encouraged His Travels

But
the Ruess family respected art and intellectual activity. So no one
objected when Everett first set out to find subjects for his painting
at the age of 16. In fact, the family encouraged his travels and sent
him money when they could. In return, Everett penned elaborate accounts
of his adventures.

On one trip, up the coast to Carmel, he
reported that he had met the photographer Edward Weston and played with
Weston's young sons. Later he would show his block prints to another
photographer, Ansel Adams, and spend time at the home of landscape
painter Maynard Dixon and his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange. (Lange
took the photograph of Everett that appeared on the LAPD police
bulletin.)

Everett Ruess wasn't around long enough for his art
or his writing to mature. But many believe that if he had lived, his
words would have been the thing to bring him fame. His descriptions of
the wilderness have earned him comparisons to a young Walt Whitman or
John Muir.

Gibbs Smith extols Ruess' skill as an environmental
writer and early defender of the fragile canyon lands. "Everett Ruess
said it better than anybody else regarding this land's spiritual and
aesthetic values."

At UCLA for One Semester

From the age
of 16 to 20, when he vanished, he spent most of his time wandering in
the wilderness alone. He sang opera to his burros, read philosophy and
tried to describe the beauty he saw around him. He made occasional
trips to the city, spending time in San Francisco and with his family
in Los Angeles–he even enrolled in UCLA for one semester in 1932. "I'm
glad I went, but I'm glad it's over," he wrote a friend.

It was
in the canyon country of Utah and Arizona, a land of "red sand, twisted
cedars, turquoise skies and distant mesas" that Ruess seemed to have
finally found what he had been seeking. His letters from this region
are full of descriptions of his personal happiness and his love of the
land. There are also more down-to-earth accounts of his mishaps.

One
day he recounted stepping on four rattlesnakes. There were crumbling
cliffsides to do battle with, as well as scorpions, poison ivy, storms
and swollen rivers. Once he just missed being gored by a wild bull. He
told of meetings with archeologists, ranchers, Indians, cowboys,
miners, bootleggers, artists and hobos.

Ruess faithfully
reported on his ever-changing family of pack animals. For awhile he
traveled with a white puppy named Curly and a mule, Pericles. He once
made up a verse to motivate his beasts to keep going through a
lightning storm:

Prod, prod, prod your burro

Gently near the tail

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

He's a kind of snail.

The
longer Everett was alone in the wilds, the more impassioned his
descriptions became. He used words like intoxicated, exuberant and
exultant to describe his moods.

He mentioned in his letters that
he had begun to take more risks in pursuit of the beauty that drove
him: I have been flirting pretty heavily with death, the old clown.

The
last letters the Ruesses had from their son were mailed from Escalante,
Utah, on Nov. 11, 1934. In the letter to his parents, he said he was
sitting by the fire, eating roast venison and baked potatoes, with the
burro bell tinkling nearby.

He said he was going south, into wild canyon country, and they might not hear from him again for several months.

To
his brother Waldo, Everett wrote: 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.

I know that I could not bear the routine
and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don't think I
could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life
already and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.