Roberts came at Ruess for thirty years, and this book is him finally inside the story instead of writing about it. First half is the life: the letters, the woodblock prints, the burros, five years of a kid in his teens crossing the Southwest alone and writing home like he already knew he was building a legend. Second half turns into a detective story. In 2008 a Navajo man named Denny Bellson found a body in a crevice on Comb Ridge, matching a story his grandfather had carried since the thirties about burying a young white traveler he saw murdered. Roberts went out, photographed the bones, and got a DNA match. Then a better lab said no — the bones were a Native man, and they’d dug up somebody’s ancestor. He writes his own part in that straight, and still thinks the grandfather told the truth and they found the wrong grave.
“We were talkin’ about old cowboy stuff,” Christensen recalled. “I said, ‘Keith, just between you and me, what do you think happened to Everett?’ “He looked at me and said, ‘I killed the son of a bitch, and if I had to do it over, I’d do it again.’
Chapter 10, page 413
“Out here,” he said, “Navajo oral tradition is pretty accurate. Based on that tradition, I think there’s a good chance this is Everett Ruess.”
Chapter 11, page 444
Greg led us unerringly to the wall with the inscription. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was Everett who had carved it. The orthography—the down-slanting E, the short-cropped M, the oval O—exactly matched the Davis Gulch inscriptions that had been found by the searchers in 1935. And if I thought the Grand Gulch granary lay in an obscure place—well, this nondescript wall in the middle of nowhere was beyond obscure.
Epilogue, page 492