Brave the Wild River

In the summer of 1938, two botanists from the University of Michigan, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, set out to conduct the first formal botanical survey of the Colorado River through the canyonlands of Utah and Arizona, including the Grand Canyon. Their forty-three-day journey covered more than 600 miles of dangerous whitewater and made them the first women on record to successfully traverse the Grand Canyon. Only about fifty men had done so since John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition, and the only woman who attempted it, Bessie Hyde, vanished with her husband in 1928. Melissa L. Sevigny reconstructs this expedition using the women's journals, letters, and photographs, weaving in the histories of botany, river exploration, conservation, and the Colorado River itself.

Sevigny traces how Clover, born in 1896 on a Nebraska farm, earned her PhD in botany from the University of Michigan in 1935 at age thirty-eight, specializing in cacti of the Río Grande Valley. Despite her qualifications, she faced persistent sexism that blocked her from better positions. Sevigny notes how botany was once considered a genteel feminine pursuit but professionalized in the late nineteenth century in ways that shut women out; by the early twentieth century, only seventeen women in the United States held PhDs in the field. In August 1937, while collecting plants in southern Utah, Clover stayed at the Mexican Hat Lodge, where she met Norman Nevills, a twenty-nine-year-old aspiring river guide who dreamed of rafting the Grand Canyon. Together they conceived a plan to boat the river and collect plants along the way.

Clover recruited Jotter, a twenty-four-year-old colleague and former student whose PhD research focused on the chromosomal genetics of Oenothera, or evening primrose. Jotter secured her father's reluctant permission and borrowed $200 for her share of the costs. Their anxiety deepened when the Saturday Evening Post published a story about Buzz Holmstrom's solo Colorado River run, in which he declared that women "do not belong in the Canyon of the Colorado" (36). Clover secured a $300 grant from the university's Rackham School of Graduate Studies and invited Eugene Atkinson, a young zoologist, as the third scientist.

Nevills built three wooden boats at Mexican Hat using a laminated plywood called SUPER-Harbord, each weighing 600 pounds with airtight compartments and a stern-first rapid-running design. Don Harris, a river gauger for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and Bill Gibson, an architect and amateur photographer, rounded out the six-person crew. The expedition launched from Green River, Utah, on June 20 before a crowd of more than a hundred grim onlookers.

The first four days on the Green River passed calmly. Then the crew reached the confluence with the Colorado and entered Cataract Canyon. The Mexican Hat tore free from its mooring, and Jotter and Harris chased it in the Wen, running through six or seven rapids before recovering the boat four miles downstream. Jotter spent the night alone on a sandbar while the rest of the crew endured a miserable bivouac on the opposite bank. At Mile-Long Rapid, Nevills initially tried to line the boats from shore but eventually ran them through. At Gypsum Creek Rapid, the Botany capsized, throwing Gibson into the river. Clover grabbed Atkinson's hand and the overturned boat's rope, riding through seven more rapids while towing the capsized vessel. Jotter and Harris rescued Gibson downstream.

Throughout these ordeals, Clover and Jotter collected plants whenever they could, cataloging cacti, grasses, and shrubs while noting how desert and riparian habitats mingled at the river's edge in transitional zones called ecotones. They recorded exotic species like tamarisk, early evidence of human ecological influence in a seemingly wild landscape. Sevigny explains the concept of ecosystems, a term coined by English botanist Arthur Tansley in 1935, and argues that Clover and Jotter's integrative survey exemplified the kind of work Tansley envisioned.

The expedition entered Glen Canyon's quiet water, where interpersonal tensions mounted. Harris worried about a job transfer deadline, Atkinson complained about collecting time, and Jotter resented Nevills's commercial approach. When a Coast Guard plane dropped a message asking them to identify themselves, the crew learned that their delayed arrival at Lee's Ferry had triggered a nationwide media frenzy. At Lee's Ferry on the nineteenth day, Harris departed and Nevills told Atkinson he was no longer welcome. They recruited replacements: Lorin Bell, a young sheepherder, and Dell Reed, a prospector who could not swim. Holmstrom arrived at Marble Canyon Lodge, gave Jotter his waterproof match case as a good-luck charm, and advised her to continue.

The reconstituted crew entered the Grand Canyon on July 13. The women collected plants at Vasey's Paradise, a spring-fed oasis, becoming the first botanists to formally catalog the site. The crew reached Bright Angel Creek on July 18 and hiked to the South Rim, where Clover collapsed from exhaustion and had to be rescued by mule. During a live NBC radio broadcast, Park Superintendent M. R. Tillotson warned that river runners have "only a fifty-fifty chance" of surviving (176). Clover spoke about her botanical collection but was interrupted when she began giving Latin names. Jotter later wrote to her roommate Kay Hussey that press coverage emphasized their sex "rather than on Botany" (181). Veteran river photographer Emery Kolb joined the crew for the final leg.

The lower Grand Canyon brought more rapids and changing vegetation as the climate grew hotter. Clover identified what she believed were new cactus species and cataloged desert tobacco, turpentine broom, and creosote bush. At Havasu Creek, she found wild grape cultivated by the Havasupai, illustrating how many riverside plants blurred the line between wild and domestic. After lining the boats around Lava Falls, the crew reached Lake Mead's slack water on July 30. Holmstrom met them in a motorboat and towed the boats to Emery Falls at Grand Wash Cliffs, marking the canyon's end. A government launch then brought the crew to Boulder Dam on July 31, forty-three days after departure.

Back in Michigan, Clover discovered that the plant press left at Bright Angel Creek for mule shipment had been mislaid. All specimens collected between Lee's Ferry and Bright Angel, including a potentially new cactus species, appeared lost. Months later, Holmstrom's companion Willis Johnson discovered the abandoned press during a subsequent river trip, and Holmstrom hauled it up the trail to mail to Michigan. With the collection restored, Clover and Jotter published two landmark papers. Their 1941 paper in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club described four previously unknown cactus species, while their 1944 paper in the American Midland Naturalist listed more than four hundred species, documented seventeen exotic plants, and concluded that the Colorado River was less important as a corridor for plant migration than previously supposed.

Jotter married mycologist Victor Cutter, Jr. in 1942 and defended her PhD in 1943; after her husband's death from cancer in 1962, she became an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, mentoring students and advocating for women's equality. Clover became the first woman in her department to earn a full professorship at the University of Michigan in 1960, retiring in 1967 and dying in Texas in 1980. Nevills continued commercial river trips until he and his wife Doris died in a 1949 plane crash. Holmstrom died in 1946 at age thirty-seven.

In 1994, at eighty, Jotter returned to the Grand Canyon on a scientific rafting expedition to assess ecological changes caused by Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963. The dam had eliminated the river's natural flood cycles, cleared its red silt, and caused daily water-level fluctuations driven by hydropower demand. Jotter observed tamarisk replacing native willows, eroding sandbars, and a river running clear instead of red. USGS scientist Robert Webb told her that the papers she published with Clover "serve as benchmarks in botanical research along the Colorado River" (243). Findings from the trip contributed to a 1996 experimental flood release from the dam, beginning a formal program of ecological restoration. Jotter died on April 30, 2013, at age ninety-nine, keeping two souvenirs from 1938: Holmstrom's match case and her yellow pith helmet, inscribed with his words: "To the girl who proved me badly mistaken" (253).