Today raft trips through the Grand Canyon are common. Several companies offer choices of a few or many days. One specifies that the client must be at least nine years old. These trips differ greatly from the one Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter took in 1938. One difference is the Hoover Dam. Before the dam, the Colorado River challenged travelers with extreme rapids, rapids now slowed and sometimes covered by the water that rose behind the dam.Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny recounts how these two women, both affiliated with the University of Michigan botany department, overcame multiple challenges in addition to the river, to map and collect plants in the canyon before many of them were submerged.
Clover, an instructor at the university, was a generation older than Jotter, a graduate student. The trip was Clover’s passion. Opposition came from a chorus of voices proclaiming that the Grand Canyon was “no place for a woman.” She overcame reluctance in the Michigan botany department to approve the project and hesitation by Norman Nevills to guide the trip. He hoped to set up a business floating adventurers through the canyon but was reluctant to take women.
Sevigny takes the reader through the hair-raising trip in boats designed by Nevills, a national media frenzy accompanying the travelers, and Clover’s frustration that no one seemed interested in the plant collecting. She had to harass Nevills to make stops so the women could collect, and the media mostly failed to mention plants as the purpose of the trip.
Sevigny includes the history of the countryside the group passed, as well as biographies of those involved. The book is full of lovely details, like the women’s selection of brown overalls to wear, because Clover thought jeans too masculine. Or the gyrations required to maintain modesty while bathing in the river. (Four men accompanied the women in three boats. The women did the cooking.)
By the end the reader is amazed that any of the collected plants made it back to Michigan and a few to the Smithsonian. Those plants and the carefully detailed descriptions Clovis and Jotter wrote became useful botanic history as scholars have tried to create a picture of flora in the canyon before the dam.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy and published in the Leaflet, November 2023, Volume 10, Issue 11.