Book Reviews

Troubled Trails: The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes From Colorado.

By Robert Silbernagel. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011. xxiii + 253 pp.Paper, $24.95.)

I BEGAN SKEPTICAL: another book on the Meeker affair, the battle at Milk Creek (1879), and the expulsion of the Utes from Colorado to Utah (1881). There has been plenty already written—Robert Emmit’s The Last War Trail (1954), Marshall Sprague’s Massacre (1957), Mark Miller’s Hollow Victory (1997), Peter Decker’s The Utes Must Go (2004), and now another. What could possibly be said that has not already been part of the discussion? I was surprised that at the end of the first fifteen pages Meeker was dead, the battle against the cavalry pretty much over, and the five hostages—three women and two children—whisked away for three week’s captivity in the hands of the White River (Yamparika) Utes. Obviously, the heart of the book lay elsewhere.

While there were many Ute and Anglo personalities threading their way through this narrative, the author wisely selected four for emphasis: Josephine Meeker, daughter of murdered Agent Nathan Meeker; Nicaagat, Ute warrior and leader; She-towitch (Susan), Ute heroine and friend of Josephine; and Charles Adams, former Ute Agent, rescuer of the captives, and negotiator during later treaty agreements. Each one played a unique role in this drama. Josephine, although she watched the Utes kill her father at the agency, nevertheless enjoyed friendships among some of the Indians and provided a detailed account of her captivity, a tale for which she later became famous. Nicaagat, opponent of the agent, was yet determined to maintain peace even after the conflict against the cavalry at Milk Creek was well underway. Anxious to iron out issues, he intelligently attempted to resolve problems even when antagonized by government negotiators. She-towitch, a determined woman, protected the captives, assisted Josephine in her trials, and later became a short-lived national celebrity at a time when public sentiment vilified most Indians. Charles Adams, one of the few white men knowledgeable about Ute culture, played an important role in obtaining the captives’ release but later proved instrumental in expelling these Native Americans to Utah. All of these complex characters were caught in difficult circumstances ripe with conflict.

A second thread running through the narrative is an on-location mapping of sites where events occurred. Where exactly did the Utes travel and camp while moving about with their hostages and where did couriers and military units move during the pursuit? Fashioned from a series of seat-in-saddle trips, Silbernagel provides believable reconstruction that ties topography to historic account. For the buff who relishes identifying the locale where the action unfolded, this is welcomed detail not found elsewhere. Readers familiar with the region will appreciate the sense of immediacy it creates.

This book is recommended as a companion piece to the others mentioned above. To the author’s credit, it is not a rehash but fresh insight into certain aspects of this twice-told tale. A close reading of the previous works highlights the valuable contribution this book makes in further understanding the complex series of events that pushed a relatively peaceful Indian group from the beautiful, mineral-rich mountains of Colorado to the high deserts of Utah. There is no question that the incident served as primary excuse to solve the “Indian problem” for one state while creating a new set of problems for a neighboring territory. More importantly, this series of events unsettled physically and psychologically a group of people who still live with decisions made over one hundred years ago. That understanding, in itself, makes the reading worthwhile.

ROBERT S. MCPHERSON Utah State University, Eastern—San Juan Campus

“My Candid Opinion”: The Sandwich Islands Diaries of Joseph F. Smith 1856-1857.

Edited by Nathaniel R. Ricks. (Salt Lake City: The Smith-PettitFoundation, 2011. xxiv +143 pp. Cloth, $100.00.)

A HISTORIAN WILL TAKE a diary and interpret it, making certain assumptions because of his or her knowledge and background. Then that individual will write it up and allow us to read it. A diary is closer to the source. It tells us exactly what the person who wrote it is thinking. The person who reads the diaries is getting the real thing, written and expressed as the individual wanted it. Is the diary simply a list of events with little or no explanation or is it more? An editor will publish it with explanations of the names and nebulous points. Unlike the document as written, Nathaniel R. Ricks, the editor, gives the reader certain helps: an excellent introduction that explains something about Joseph F. Smith, details that may not be in the diaries so we can understand the entries better, Joseph F.’s feelings, and answers to some of the questions raised by the author.

To find out these answers one must always read the footnotes. Ricks also gives us a list of prominent characters in the diaries. We can all be thankful for this excellent list.

Following the introduction and the prominent character list, is the primary source, the diary itself. We quickly find out that missionary work was much different then than it is now. Joseph F. Smith does not knock on doors. Rather, he reads and preaches, and then investigators ask for baptism. The members bring their neighbors to meetings or else the curious come because they have heard about a meeting.

If one thought that all Mormon presidents were perfect from the beginning, we find through these diaries that Joseph F. is very prejudiced toward the Hawaiian natives. He thinks they are lazy, noncommittal, and sinful. They say one thing and proceed to do something else. His missionary diary shows that he was a very strong minded person, and his later life bears that out.

Joseph F. is not as expressive as we would like him to be. Yet, he is better than most missionary diarists. He explains where he is at, when he preaches, and his opinions of the native people. He also tells about what he ate and the difficulty, at times, of finding enough to eat. He may have expected the members to feed him, but it was not beneath his dignity to work for his food.

Is it important that this diary be published? The answer, of course, is yes. It tells the youthful views and experiences of a very important person in the history of the LDS church. The reader should know that reading the Deseret News was an important part of Smith’s missionary life. The newspaper printed the sermons of the brethren in Salt Lake City, and Smith studied them in great detail-—on occasions spending an entire day reading the newspaper. Through this study he gained a great knowledge of LDS doctrine and teachings that served as the basis of the teachings of the church which will be the basis for the rest of his life. However, that aspect of his missionary experience is not explained. Also, I wish the editor would have given us a little more background about missionary work by other Christian religions. More especially, were there other religious groups in the islands besides the Calvinists and Catholics? Except for those two small shortcomings I think this is a valuable book that is needed to understand a man of Joseph F. Smith’s stature.

RONALD G. WATT South Jordan

Pansy’s History: The Autobiography of Margaret E. P. Gordon, 1866-1966.

Transcribed and Edited by Claudia L. Bushman. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011.Xviii + 326 pp. Cloth, $34.95.)

THE UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS SERIES “Life Writings of Frontier Women” adds another impressive editor to its list. Claudia L. Bushman has authored and edited several books including Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah. She taught American studies at Columbia University and Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University from 2008-2011. Bushman’s contribution to this series is a discovery that most historians only dream about—her Grandmother Gordon’s autobiography “Family History”—uncovered in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library in 2002. Margaret Elizabeth Schutt Gordon “Pansy” started writing her autobiographical “Family History” in 1928 when she was sixty-two-years-old and added to it sporadically for thirty-six years.

Pansy’s narrative reads like a novel—her life was very complicated and involved extensive travel. Born January 29, 1866, to Henry and Eliza Schutt in Bingley, Yorkshire, England, Pansy considered her childhood in rural English towns to be ideal. In 1876, when she was ten years old, her father accepted a teaching position with the Church of England’s Church Missionary Society to Metlakahtla, British Columbia, Canada, to teach the “Christianized Indians” (2). Bushman speculates that most likely the family expected someday to return to England to live, but this was never to happen and Pansy’s adventure commenced. Pansy wrote: “And began a new life as different from the one lived in England as was possible to imagine” (41). The family lived in Canada until 1882 when they moved to Salt Lake City to stay with her mother’s sister Christiana Venables Vernon Smith. In 1883, the family again moved for another teaching position at Henvey’s Inlet, a small settlement near Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada.

About 1885 the Schutt family returned to Salt Lake City where they were baptized into the Mormon church. In 1889, the family moved to Meadowville, seven miles southeast of Pickleville in Rich County, to try their hand at farming. Pansy found a position teaching school in Laketown, which she held for several years. She met a local man—James Frater Gordon to whom she became engaged in 1891. On July 13, 1893, at the age of twenty-seven she wed James in the Logan Temple. In 1897, her sister Fannie Vernon Schutt married James’ brother Robert John Gordon. Pansy’s two sons James Kenneth and Henry Fairfax were born in Meadowville.

In the spring of 1899, James and John Gordon and their families were called on missions to help settle Stirling, Alberta, Canada. Pansy wrote: “We all felt some sadness at leaving a home in which we had been so happy, but a static existence in a place like Meadowville was out of the question—It was a sacrifice in some ways to me—the furniture I had worked for & enjoyed had to be disposed of” (127). With ambivalent feelings they arrived in Canada in August 1899, where other family members eventually joined them. Their two daughters, Annie Hortense and Jean Vernon, were born in Stirling. In October 1906, after years of struggling to make a living, Pansy and James decided to move to Raymond. In 1915, they left Canada and moved to Salt Lake City and from there to California where a married daughter, Hortense, and her husband Blaine Steed were living. In the spring of 1927, Pansy made use of her genealogy training at the Los Angeles Public Library and eventually she received more genealogical training in Salt Lake City. In September 1934, Pansy was asked by LDS California Mission President Alonzo Hinckley to head genealogy work, a calling which she held until 1945. She lived until October 3, 1966, when she died in San Francisco at the age of one hundred.

Since “Family History” is not a continuous work Bushman supplements it with chapter introductions, letters, diary excerpts, and footnotes. Bushman also includes a biographical introduction, genealogy charts, maps, many photographs, a chronology and appendix, and an ever helpful index. Since Pansy identifies many people, short biographical sketches would have been helpful, as would have a brief history of the places where she lived. Somewhat confusing is the inconsistent use of both names—Pansy and Margaret—throughout the book.

“Family History” provides insight into the somber reality of trying to make a new life in a new country. Pansy faced many health, family, and financial problems in her life, but she was not afraid to travel long distances or live in less than satisfactory conditions in the hope of improving future circumstances. Greatest of all, Pansy’s “History” illustrates the importance of her family as they worked at maintaining their family unit through their many hardships.

LINDA THATCHER Salt Lake City

Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s Mustangs.

By J. Edward De Steiguer. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011. xiii + 249 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

“WILD HORSES, with swiftness, strength and freedom, have always had the power to evoke passion. From Lascaux’s cave artists in southwestern France fifteen thousand years ago to modern Americans, the image of wild horses running free on the open plain has inspired the human spirit and captured the soul like few things in nature.... Yet while wild horses may be an inspiration to many, to others (especially those who rely on America’s western federal lands for their livelihood) they are a curse on the land”(1). These thoughts provide the thesis for the book—the history of the horse, the passion the wild horse invokes in many people, and that there are others who just want them eliminated from the western scene.

Part One of the book discusses the origin and evolution of the horse from an animal nearly sixty million years ago with four toes that was slightly more than a foot in height to the modern one-hoofed horse standing five feet or more in height.

During most of the last Ice Age equines were located on all the major land masses. However by the end of the Ice Age, approximately twenty thousand years ago, the equines became extinct on the American continent and probably would have died out in Eurasia if they had not been domesticated by humans.

Most ancient civilizations eventually domesticated the horse. Some made more successful use of horse than others, but warfare seemed to be the dominant motivation for the use of the horse.

Part II of the book discusses the introduction of the horse to the western hemisphere. The first horses came in 1493 with the second voyage of Christopher Columbus. The horses brought to America were from Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain. They were probably a result of crossing the Barbs brought by the Moors from North Africa with native Spanish horses. They were small horses that possessed agility, strength, and courage.

The author describes how the Spanish settlement spread horses from the island of Espanola, to present-day Mexico and north through the American southwest. Catholic missions established in Mexico, California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico had herds of horses. Some escaped and became wild horses.

When Lewis and Clark made their expedition from St Louis to the Pacific Ocean, most of the Indian tribes they encountered had horses which they had obtained by trading with and stealing from the Spanish and from other tribes. “The Indians of North America after acquiring horses developed what is regarded as one of the world’s great equestrian cultures. Within a short time, Indians passed from terrified amazement of these ‘elk dogs,’ or ‘big dogs,’ as they first called horses, to a mastery unsurpassed in the history of civilization”(78).

By 1890, the Indian, the bison, and the Spanish mustang had all but disappeared from the Great Plains. The Spanish mustang as a pure type was gone from the plains, but was later rediscovered in a few remote and geographically isolated havens in the Far West.

Part three of the book discusses the ongoing politics of the wild horse with a special emphasis on the story of Velma Bronn Johnston, better known as “Wild Horse Annie.” Her story begins in 1950. As she was driving to work one morning in Reno, Nevada, she found herself at a stoplight alongside a cattle truck filled with wild eyed mustangs, many of them cut and bleeding. She had heard stories of the wild horses being chased by aircraft and then hauled in trucks to a processing plant to be turned into pet food. Now she knew the stories were true.

She spent much of the next three decades trying to save these animals that she came to love. She spoke out in public against the Bureau of Land Management and livestock interests. Her efforts were successful. In 1955 Nevada enacted a law that prevented the pursuit of wild horses by aircraft and motorized vehicles. In 1959, President Eisenhower signed a nationwide bill into law similar to the Nevada law. Finally, in December 1971, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act became the law of the land.

The passage of the bill did not end the controversy. Wild horses reproduce rapidly and the law does not provide satisfactory methods for handling the excess horses or addressing the issue of overgrazing on allotted areas, and conflicts with ranchers that run cattle on federal lands.

Edward De Steiguer makes it quite clear where his sympathies lie, but he has written a very readable book that covers the complete history of the horse and gives a well-balanced discussion of the current political and physical problems in administering the Wild Horse and Burros Act and in taking care of the horses and the lands they inhabit.

KENT PETERSEN Ferron

“Swell Suffering:” A Biography of Maurine Whipple.

By Veda Tebbs Hale.(Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011. xiii + 457 pp. Cloth, $31.95.)

ST. GEORGE, UTAH, was home to two of Mormon literature’s most famous writers: Juanita Brooks and Maurine Whipple. Both women transcended not only the isolation and insulation of their desert childhoods, but also the constraints of womanhood in a man’s world of letters. Both courageously and artfully mined the history and folklore of southwestern Utah and told the story of Mormon settlement without shying away from its most sensitive subjects. And both, to one degree or another, experienced the ostracism that can result from writing frankly about those subjects. It is not surprising, then, that over the last half-century since their most important works were published, many people outside academia have confused one with the other. Levi Peterson helped diminish that problem with publication of his masterful biography of Juanita Brooks in 1988. Now, Veda Tebbs Hale has put to rest any possibility of confusing these two icons of Mormon literature with publication of her thoroughly penetrating biography of Maurine Whipple.

Swell Suffering: A Biography of Maurine Whipple, tells us just about everything we want to know about the author of one of the great Mormon novels, and a lot of things we might rather have not known. Hale, like most who knew Maurine Whipple well, has approached her subject with highest admiration for the one book Whipple is famous for, and a sense of exasperation for the difficult and chaotic aspects of her personal life. By the time you’ve waded through the endless circle of ups and downs in Whipple’s life, you wonder if that life merited the twenty years Veda Hale put into researching and writing this exhaustive account. And then you consider The Giant Joshua, the one great book Whipple produced at the pinnacle of her life and you realize, as Hale did, that the life story of the woman who wrote that book should be told, as honestly, as forthrightly and as unvarnished as she told the Mormon story of polygamy. When it comes to the life of Maurine Whipple, everything points toward and back to The Giant Joshua.

This is a Cinderella story, heavy on the ashes. A small town Mormon girl dreams of life, love and acclaim in the literary world. In her late thirties the acclaim came for Maurine Whipple as a perfect storm of circumstances culminated with publication of her masterpiece. But love is fleeting, and the “Happily Ever After” that is supposed to follow never quite materialized. The perfect storm never formed again. For decades, readers have wondered what happened to the much talked about sequel(s) to The Giant Joshua. Veda Hale has come as close as we will likely ever get to the answer to that and many other questions about this enigmatic woman. Drawing from numerous interviews with Maurine and her contemporaries, and delving deeply into Whipple’s papers at Dixie State College and the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, Hale has compassionately and objectively pieced together the writer’s life.

It is Whipple’s one great success that lies at the heart of the story—how an aspiring writer overcomes isolation and provinciality to gain national prominence. How in one book she captures the essence of life in a small Mormon settlement and turns it into a story that grips the imagination of a national readership and, to different degrees, offends the sensibilities of the descendants of the people she wrote about. Underlying and overarching it all is the tragedy of a gifted writer who throughout her life desperately seeks acceptance—a place where she can truly belong. It is a search that winds through a life of desperate neediness, fractured family relationships, physical frailty, unmet aspirations, and unrequited love.

Hale depends heavily on many of Whipple’s surviving letter drafts. She does an admirable job of analyzing and documenting the available information. The human being Hale portrays here will ring true to the old-timers of St. George who knew Maurine Whipple. And Hale’s painstaking research will help them begin to understand the eccentricities they saw in the woman who lived out the remainder of her life beneath the vermilion cliffs she so dearly loved. Many of them, as well as anyone who has read The Giant Joshua, will be interested to learn that Maurine Whipple never completely turned her back on the culture that spawned her, and died in full fellowship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

LYMAN HAFEN Zion Natural History Association

Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife.

By Philip L. Fradkin. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. xvi + 280 pp. Cloth, $24.95), and Finding Everett Ruess: The Remarkable Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer. By David Roberts.(New York: Broadway Books, 2011. xxx + 396 pp. Cloth, $25.00.)

EVERETT RUESS was a twenty-year-old Los Angeles-based adventurer who vanished in November 1934 while trekking southeast of Escalante, Utah. He has since emerged in the popular imagination as a mythic wunderkind firmly ensconced in the pantheon of misunderstood artists.

In 1982, W.L. “Bud” Rusho published Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, a best-selling compilation of some of Everett’s correspondence and artwork. Later, Rusho edited Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess (1998), Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty and Wilderness Journals (1998), and The Mystery of Everett Ruess (2010). With the publication of the first full-scale, book-length biographies of Everett, released separately by two national publishers, 2011 may well be remembered as a milestone in Everett Ruess studies.

The first is mountaineer-journalist David Roberts’s Finding Everett Ruess; the second is Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip L. Fradkin’s Everett Ruess. Each book covers similar territory, while still offering its author’s own approach, analysis, and interpretation. Roberts’s fast-paced study showcases an investigative journalist’s preoccupations, detailing Everett’s short life, tragic disappearance, and Christopher and Stella Ruess’s attempts to find out what happened to their second son. It is the more judgmental of Everett’s youthful prejudices and missteps. It offers an extended heart-wrenching narrative of the victimization of Everett’s parents at the hands of a string of confidence men seeking to profit from their grief and hope.

Much to Roberts’s credit, he does not shy away from his own controversial investigations, beginning in the late 1990s, into Everett’s disappearance, including the sensational news in 2009 that he and others had finally succeeded–where others had repeatedly failed–in identifying Everett’s remains, cached in a crevice in southeastern Utah, and subsequent confession that they, and the forensic and DNA experts they had relied upon, had been mistaken. Roberts’s mea culpa makes for some of his book’s most fascinating reading. One senses how painful it must have been for Roberts to have the Ruess family, perhaps feeling exploited by the emotional experience, intentionally exclude him from any involvement in retesting the DNA samples thought to have been Everett’s.

Fradkin’s analysis is more academic and scholarly, complete with footnotes and endnotes. (Roberts’s book lacks these finding aids, making it sometimes frustrating for readers interested in knowing the source for a particular quotation.) Fradkin’s treatment is also the more traditionally biographical in scope and structure. Fradkin plumbs the documentary sources more completely, thereby offering a fully informed, nuanced analysis and appreciation of Everett. (Thanks to Everett’s family, Everett’s papers are now housed in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. The Marriott Library also recently acquired Fradkin’s own papers.)

Both writers are trenchant, knowledgeable narrators, conversant with the written sources as well as with the physical landscapes that dominated Everett’s existence. Under their gaze, Everett emerges as a precocious, thoughtful, if occasionally self-absorbed, adolescent drawn to the natural world, whose beauty he hoped to capture in images (photographs, water colors, and linoleum block prints) and words (poetry, letters, diaries, and essays). Everett’s constant attempts to communicate the seemingly indescribable beauty he encountered both powered and frustrated the intensely felt creativity to which he struggled desperately to give expression. He also longed for satisfying, intimate companionship, but this too seemed to be forever unattainable. Everett’s last known words, “Nemo 1834,” left in stone, speak to his admiration of Jules Verne’s misanthropic “Captain Nemo,” to its Latin meaning, “No man,” and, sadly, to how Everett may have come to see himself at the end of his life. Like others before them, Roberts and Fradkin hazard some speculation as to Everett’s state of mind, including the possibility that he suffered from the early stages of a bipolar, or manic-depressive, disorder, as well as to questions regarding Everett’s sexual orientation. Roberts is the more skeptical of such approaches. “It is more important,” he suggests “to attend to all the nuances of his attraction to various friends and strangers than to label him as gay or bisexual. In the same way, the mood swings speak for themselves, and to deduce that Everett had a bipolar disorder does little or nothing to aid our understanding of this complicated and articulate young adventurer” (105). Fradkin, on the other hand, deftly draws upon psychology as a tool for better understanding Everett. Fradkin’s discussion, which builds upon and adds to previous treatments of these subjects, is subtle yet illuminating. Given Roberts’s interest in trying to better understand the states of mind of some of his other past subjects I suspect that, if pressed, Roberts might concede that a careful, probing analysis of Everett’s mental state could aid our understanding of him. Still, not everyone might agree, as Fradkin discovered when Everett’s surviving nephews and nieces, after they learned of Fradkin’s psychological interpretation, withdrew their cooperation regarding his biography.

Roberts and Fradkin both display sensitivity in considering the contours of Everett’s multi-faceted personality. Roberts broaches Everett’s apparent fear of intimacy, wondering if such “tension lay at the core of the insatiable wandering loner he was fast becoming” (61). He also reads one of Everett’s letters to his older brother, Waldo, as alluding to suicide. (Fradkin seems not to read suicide into the same letter.) That Everett’s father reached such a possibility, even if he ultimately rejected it, points to the value in scrutinizing Everett’s state of mind, as best reconstructed through a careful examination of his letters and diaries.

The same may be said of a discussion of Everett’s sexuality. Both authors know that Everett censored himself when writing to his parents. Given his brother Waldo’s apparent homophobia, it is not surprising that Everett may have concealed some especially private areas of his life from his own family. Consider, for example, that in a letter to a friend Everett used the term “homosexual love,” and not some pejorative phrase. Also revealing is Everett’s admission to Frances Schermerhorn of what seems to have been a sexual encounter only months before he disappeared: “True, I have had many experiences with people, and some very close ones, but there was too much that could not be spoken. I had a strange experience with a young fellow at an outpost, a boy I’d known before. It seems that only in moments of desperation is the soul most truly revealed” (Fradkin, 64). I’m not necessarily offering a judgment as to Everett’s sexuality. I simply believe it would be a mistake not to pursue hints such as these and others in attempting to get a better handle on Everett. Clearly, a next logical step in Ruess studies would be a comprehensive, definitive, accurate edition of all of Everett’s known writings.

Roberts also examines more closely those portions of Everett’s handwritten diaries that, at some point and for some reason, were deliberately erased. This deleted material, which Roberts speculates may have been removed by Everett himself (though arguments could be made for the involvement of his parents, as well), represents one of the more tantalizing mysteries regarding Everett.

Roberts devotes some of his later treatment to events following Everett’s disappearance, including the intriguing possibility that some of Everett’s lost diaries and letters–which, Roberts seems to imply, were probably stolen–may actually be locked away in the personal safes and libraries of one or more private collectors. Fradkin touches on some of these issues, but he is more interested in Ruess family dynamics after Everett’s disappearance, particularly the emotional toll as Waldo tried to hold his father responsible, while Christopher looked instead to blame his wife Stella.

Fradkin uses his last chapter to dissect Roberts’s and others’ involvement in the 2008-2009 misidentification of Native American bones as belonging to Everett. Where Roberts tends to fault computer software for the error, Fradkin is generally unsparing in suggesting that the wrong people used the wrong equipment and methods to arrive at what could only be the wrong results. “It was a classic setup for a spectacular failure,” Fradkin writes (192). He also blames “misguided and sales-driven journalism” (7). In fact, as both men narrate the same episode, the story seems largely to be one of hubris run amok.

Both authors come across as balanced, opinionated, critically minded researchers whose skepticism helps to bring us closer to the truth, though I wish Roberts were as critical as Fradkin in evaluating recent claims regarding new “evidences” of Everett’s passage through southern Utah, including the “discovery” of additional, probably faked, “Nemo” inscriptions.

Roberts’s and Fradkin’s books provide clues and hints as to what may have happened to Everett in November 1934. Roberts seems to be more persuaded that Everett may have been murdered; Fradkin seems to lean in favor of an accident, perhaps death by quicksand. Given Everett’s possibly manic-depressive mental state, suicide (either passive or aggressive) should not be discarded. Despite the speculation, however well-informed or imaginative, the mystery endures.

Thanks, in part, to the work of skilled investigators like Fradkin and Roberts, Everett Ruess survives today as one of those rare individuals forever destined to remain an enigma, a looming spectral presence whose infectious wanderlust and love of nature and beauty resonate with each new generation.

GARY JAMES BERGERA Salt Lake City