IN ONE of his letters to his brother Waldo, Everett Ruess wrote that "when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is." Certainly, the Escalante region of Southern Utah (since 1996, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument) fit the bill - miles of barren canyons, soaring buttes, and mesas where only a handful of sheep and cattle herders ever set foot. The town of Escalante, from which Ruess set out on what was to be his final journey, was essentially the end of the line. A Mormon settlement of a few hundred hard-bitten souls, "it was one of the most provincial towns in the world," says Roberts. "I can't imagine a kid with two burros walking through the place." Salt Lake bookstore owner Sanders says that even today, "If you arrived in town with a Sierra Club bumper sticker on your car, you'd find your windows bashed in and your tires slashed." The nearby town of Boulder was the last place in the continental US to receive regular mail service.

What happened to Ruess remains a baffling mystery. Southwest historian Harry Aleson spent much of the 1940s searching for clues to Ruess's fate, with little to show for his efforts. River runner Ken Sleight - on whom Edward Abbey is said to have based the character of "Seldom Seen Smith" in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (Lippincott) - developed an acute case of "Ruessitis" after coming across a NEMO inscription not far from Davis Gulch. The original impetus for Diane Orr's documentary was to explore Ruess's relationship to the wilderness. But, like so many before her, she became fascinated by what might have happened to him. "You become very obsessed," she admits. "The mystery intrigues you. The more you do the mystery, the more involved you get."

There are four major theories to explain Ruess's disappearance, none of them totally convincing. One is that he died in an accident, perhaps falling from a canyon ledge or drowning while trying to cross the San Juan or Colorado Rivers. That's what publisher Smith believes. Ruess's own writings point in this direction. In one letter, written a few months before his disappearance, he describes his own "reckless self-confidence" and admits that "hundreds of times I have trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and nearly vertical angles in the search for water or cliff dwellings." But Roberts, who has explored Davis Gulch, says the canyon is formed in such a way that had Ruess fallen from any kind of height, searchers would have found his body.

Instead, Roberts maintains a second theory: that Ruess was murdered by cattle rustlers in the Escalante. It was the Depression, he notes, and with rustling on the increase, the Cattleman's Association in the Escalante put out a false rumor that the government had sent an agent to find out what was going on. "The rustlers mistook Everett for a government agent, killed him, and dumped him in the Colorado River," he says.

Roberts bases his conclusions on a series of interviews he conducted for a 1999 National Geographic article, including a conversation with Escalante old-timer Norm Christiansen, who, as a small boy, had met Ruess. Christiansen told Roberts that in 1949 or 1950, a local brawler and sometime cattle rustler named Keith Riddle confessed the crime to him. "He just looked at me and he said, 'I killed the son of a bitch and if I had to do it over, I'd do it again,'" Christiansen told Roberts.

Roberts also discovered documents in the papers of Ruess investigator Harry Aleson that appear to point toward Riddle and two associates as Ruess's killers.

However, it seems questionable that rustlers would have mistaken a youthful hiker with two burros and a box of paints for a government agent. And filmmaker Orr remains unconvinced by the rustler theory. "There was bad blood in that town," she says, which created the possibility that people were out to get back at others by accusing them of Ruess's death. For his part, Roberts contends that as time passed - and certain individuals in Escalante died - others were more willing to speak up and tell the truth.

Over the years, rumors also surfaced pointing to a third possibility: that Ruess hadn't died at all, but had disappeared on purpose - that he was living among the Navajos or had started a new life for himself somewhere else under a different identity. His brother Waldo has a thick file of Everett "sightings" from Florida to California. When Desert Magazine published the article that started the Ruess "craze" in 1939, a woman named Cora Keagle wrote a letter insisting that she and her husband had come across Ruess south of Monterrey, Mexico, in April 1937, which was three years after he had disappeared. According to her account, the couple had struck up a conversation with a young watercolorist who said he lived in Arizona, painting among the Indians. When she saw his photograph in the magazine, her husband exclaimed, "That's the very fellow!" But today, few Ruess sleuths give the "Everett is alive" scenario much credence.

Then there is the fourth notion: that Ruess may have killed himself - or perhaps willed his own death. "I don't know if he committed suicide," says Salt Lake City editor Bergera. "But it answers a lot of questions." Bergera argues that "a terrible melancholy permeates every line of his letters." Among the many examples of that sadness is a 1931 letter in which Ruess describes himself as a "freakish person" with no one to share his interests. In a diary entry the following year, he continues in a similar vein: "I feel futile. It seems after all that a solitary life is not good.... More and more I feel I don't belong in the world. I am losing contact with life."

On the other hand, these sentiments can be easily ascribed to the emotional excesses of adolescence. Editor W.L. Rusho, who rediscovered Ruess in the 1980s, is dubious about Bergera's contentions. "He simply collected all of Everett's gloomy comments," he says.

Bergera and others also contend that the young artist might have been gay or at least struggling with his sexual orientation. This could help account for his feelings of isolation; it might also explain his presumed death, whether by suicide or gay-bashing. But again, this hypothesis depends upon a few puzzling comments in his letters, such as one he wrote in 1934 to a woman friend in San Francisco: "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."

The fact that Ruess's mother erased a number of passages in his journals after his disappearance does raise suspicions. And although Ruess's brother Waldo has resisted this idea, few Ruess sleuths are inclined to dismiss the gay theory out of hand. "It is possible," says Orr. "He did have a sense of being different, of not fitting in." In her film, historian Hugh Lacy insists that Ruess was homosexual and therefore a "target," and that he was killed by someone named "Two-Gun Jimmy Palmer." But there is no evidence to back this up.

What can be said with some assurance is that in his last months, Ruess was following a course that might have led to his death - taking greater risks, exploring increasingly obscure and dangerous places, and, in the end, literally walking off the end of the earth. "He had a built-in destiny," says Orr. "He was going about things with more abandon. He was creating a character of himself in his letters and became that character. On that course, his death was inevitable."

WHATEVER ultimately happened to him, part of Ruess's appeal is that people can see in him whatever they want - the tortured adolescent dreamer, the fearless explorer of the wilderness, the environmentalist, the early-day Matthew Shepard. He never had to make the compromises life requires of most of us, so he could stay true to his dream. "People project their own psychology onto him," notes publisher Smith. "To me, he is pure, unpolluted, naive. What makes him special and important is his clairvoyant eye. I don't need all the other baggage."

Still, in part propelled by all that "baggage," the cult of Ruess continues to grow. Smith's assistant, Anita Woods, glimpsed that several months ago when a man with a glazed look in his eyes wandered into the publishing company's offices and proclaimed, "I am the reincarnated spirit of Everett Ruess!" And David Roberts notes that, at first, few people viewed Christopher McCandless, the wild-eyed dreamer of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, as an object of veneration. Now, the abandoned school bus where McCandless took refuge north of Alaska's Mount McKinley has become a pilgrimage site, covered with flowers and lit by candles. "With Everett," he says, "the same thing is waiting to happen."

Neil Miller is most recently the author of Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s (Alyson). He can be reached at mrneily@aol.com