On a chilly winter morning in January of 1928, Colorado gold miner W.E. Mendenhall wasn’t trying to fool anyone. He was just going about his business in Grand Junction, Colorado, unaware that a skeleton wearing his clothes had been found in a remote desert cabin and identified as his own.
In the rugged desert nine miles south of the Utah-Arizona state line, the abandoned cabin was discovered a year earlier by explorers from the Prathe-Bray Colorado River Expedition. Upon entering the cabin, they found a degraded skeleton clothed in a tattered suit and seated in a wooden chair before an old table. A dusty chessboard was on the table. Its chess pieces were standing at attention, just as they had stood when the game was left unfinished some 30 years earlier.
Tucked inside the pockets of the threadbare suit hanging from the skeleton were letters addressed to the miner W.E. Mendenhall, dated 1894, along with a checkbook issued to Mendenhall by the First National Bank of Durango. A chair opposite the skeleton was pushed back, as if someone had stood abruptly. This all gave rise to the conclusion that the skeleton belonged to Mendenhall, and that he had been murdered by the man with whom he was playing chess.
A reporter from The Rocky Mountain News got their hands on the story and ran with it. They hoped to locate a relative of Mendenhall who might like to know the miner’s lonely remains had been found. They didn’t expect to find Mendenhall himself alive and well. After sharing news of the misidentified skeleton with the dumbfounded miner over a long-distance telephone call, the reporter secured a quote from him for the paper: “Not my bones.”
As strange as the circumstances seemed, Mendenhall believed he had an explanation for how the skeleton, wearing his clothes and in possession of his belongings, ended up in an isolated cabin in the Arizona desert.
Back in 1894, Mendenhall and his brother joined a man named Savage on a rafting expedition down the Colorado River. Their adventure took them through a seldom-traversed area called Lees Ferry, not far from where the cabin was located. After a jarring and treacherous battle against the angry waters, the group proudly declared themselves the first white men to cross the rapids, unaware an expedition team lead by naturalist John Wesley Powell had claimed that honor in 1869.
The Mendenhall group still had countless miles of the Colorado River to navigate before their expedition was complete. It soon proved to be too much for Savage, who was overcome with fatigue around 20 miles below Lees Ferry. Doubtful of his ability to complete the journey he urged Mendenhall and his brother to go on without him.
Mendenhall refused to leave Savage behind. He figured that if he lightened their load, better progress could be made in getting the ailing man out of the wilderness. Mendenhall navigated their boat to shore and cached their excess belongings along the edge of the river. Included in their cache were a portable chess game, along with Mendenhall’s letters, checkbook, and suit of clothes.
The men were fortunate to complete their journey in one piece, but never returned to collect their cache. As Mendenhall surmised when speaking with The Rocky Mountain News, their cache must have been looted by the man whose skeleton was found in the deserted Arizona cabin. That man must have been wearing Mendenhall’s suit when he was murdered in the cabin over a game of chess gone wrong.
