History

Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon (Norton), 304 pp. Hardback, $30.00.

“Scientists Brave Death in Rapids,” read the title card of a newsreel playing in theaters across America in the summer of 1938. The footage, shot by Jack McFarland of the Pathé News corporation, featured small boats launching into the turbid and turbulent waters of the Colorado River in Arizona.

Those intrepid scientists were Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, the first women to travel down the length of the Colorado River by boat. They went from Green River, Utah, to Lake Mead in Nevada, a 43-day journey that covered more than 600 miles. The 41-year-old Clover, a professor of botany at the University of Michigan, and the 23-year-old Jotter, her PhD student, were engaged in academic field work, attempting to collect and catalog desert plants of the American Southwest. Clover contracted with Utah boatman Norm Nevills to lead the expedition, and Nevills in turn hired a few other men to act as crew. (Clover and Jotter were spared the duties of rowing and steering down the rapids, but they were expected to do all the cooking.)

Melissa Sevigny, a science writer from Tucson (and the author of two other books about the Southwest), tells the story of Clover and Jotter’s journey in Brave the Wild River. She is partly resurrecting an inspirational account of two pioneering women; while their story may not be widely known today, their 1938 expedition, Sevigny explains, generated “a nationwide media frenzy” at the time, with newspaper across the country reporting on their progress and speculating about their fate.

John Wesley Powell had become famous for being the first U.S. explorer to take the dangerous Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, in 1869 and then again in successive expeditions. Other men had followed in his wake, but many suffered severe injuries, and some died in the attempt. In 1928, newlyweds Glen and Bessie Smith tried to boat down the river and vanished before making it to the Nevada border; their demise received national attention. The death of Bessie Smith, the only woman to attempt the dangerous Colorado River trip, was an ill omen for Clover and Jotter, who received many sexist warnings that they were foolish to enter a deadly environment so clearly unsuitable and inhospitable to women.

While there were certainly risks—and even a couple of close calls—during the expedition, it was completed without any casualties, and Clover and Jotter were themselves annoyed at the media hype. They saw themselves as serious scientists, not gendered daredevils. In a letter to a friend, Jotter complained about the press coverage and noted that “the emphasis has been on ♀ rather than on Botany.” Sevigny draws attention back to the scientific work that Clover and Jotter were doing—work that first led to a study of canyon cacti and then culminated in a 52-page scientific journal article, “Floristic Studies in the Canyon of the Colorado and Tributaries” (1944), which cataloged hundreds of plants and provided an important reference for future botanists. As Deborah Blum has remarked in the New York Times, “Unlike those old-time newspaper reporters, Sevigny does not look at her subjects and see women out of place. She sees women doing their job and doing it well.”

Sevigny’s book—perhaps counterintuitively—is most exciting when focused on botanical matters rather than death-defying feats of oarsmanship. The prose occasionally intensifies to convey the thrill of the river rapids (“Crash! Another wave swamped the boat”), but the expedition is not especially interesting for its dangers. No one got hurt, and the situation was never really dire. Botany, meanwhile, had become a field of national significance during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The accurate understanding of plants and crops could be a life-and-death business, and it was starting to play a role in public policy.

The descriptions of desert vegetation are where Sevigny’s work really shines.

The descriptions of desert vegetation are where Sevigny’s work really shines. We learn, for instance, about “porcupinegrass (Stipa spartea),” which “planted its own seeds by dropping javelin-shaped awns headfirst into the dirt, where they spun counterclockwise like an auger, a rare form of reproduction known as geocarpy.” And we see “twining snapdragon (Maurandya antirrhiniflora), a plant with rambling tendrils and magenta blossoms shaped like pursed lips waiting for a kiss.”

As these examples might indicate, there are a lot of Latin binomials in this book, probably enough to make a publisher nervous. But the lyrical quality of these exotic names adds poetry to the plants of the Southwest: Celtis reticulata, Ephedra torreyana, Fraxinus anomala. Sevigny is clearly impressed by Clover and Jotter’s botanical knowledge, and her enthusiasm is infectious. We are told that the rare yellow blossoms of Agave utahensis attract “a paparazzi of bats” and that mesquite trees “grow minuscule leaves in pairs along stems, barely big enough to make decent confetti, and turn them slantwise to the sun during the day to minimize evaporation.”

We also learn that English names are often inferior to Spanish ones when it comes to the botany of the Southwest. Clover, in a 1937 paper, insisted that Mexican observers had developed better classifications for the region’s vegetation; she argued that “local Spanish nomenclature” was preferable for scientific work. The barbed spiny plant known in English as teddy bear cholla (Opuntia bigelovii), Sevigny points out, is better described by its Spanish name, velas de coyote (coyote’s candles), because “bright sunlight can transfigure the cactus into a whole candelabrum of lit tapers.”

Sevigny’s book also finds success in the appealing characters of Clover and Jotter. The bespectacled Professor Clover was a self-described “confirmed bachelor” who, when not studying cacti, enjoyed riding horses and drinking whiskey (though she avoided profanity, even in her private writing). By contrast, the outgoing and unmarried Jotter made her father nervous with her various flirtations and relationships with men (like those she would camp with on the long journey down the Colorado River). Less outdoorsy than her advisor, she described herself as “bookish and a bit of a klutz.”

By drawing extensively from journals kept by them and other members of the expedition, Sevigny captures their voices on the page. The diction is occasionally charming for its old-timey slang. The trip is “swell”; the newspaper reports are “ballyhoo.” “I’m all pepped up,” says Jotter at the midway point. “I’m restless as the deuce,” says Clover after the trip is over.

Clover and Jotter also stand out as women with PhDs in the sciences, especially at a time when such distinctions were remarkably rare. (Jotter completed her doctorate in 1943.) And Sevigny adds helpful context about how many other women doubtless would have matched Clover and Jotter’s success if given the chance—most notably Ellen Thompson, the sister of John Wesley Powell. In the early 1870s, Thompson accompanied her brother to the Arizona and Utah deserts. While he took to the river, she stayed on land and collected plant specimens—over two hundred varieties in six months, which she delivered to botany professor Asa Gray at Harvard for cataloging. “I never felt more exuberant in my life,’ she wrote. Brave the Wild River captures this exuberance of women in STEM fields and highlights the significance of their work for a mature ecological understanding of the American Southwest.