American Scientist

The Grand Canyon is often described in terms of its geological beauty, with its multicolored rock layers providing a physical, visual map of time. But it’s also filled with plants and flowers, some of which are unique to the Canyon. According to the National Park Service website for the Grand Canyon, there are approximately 1,737 known species of vascular plants, 167 different species of fungi, 64 species of moss, and 195 species of lichen found in the park. The Grand Canyon has a dozen endemic plants, and 129 vegetation communities. This unique flora is mostly because of the 2,438-meter elevation difference from the river to the highest point on the North Rim. It’s awe-inspiring to think about.

But back in 1938, we didn’t know all of this. Indeed, back then, no one had yet surveyed the plants of the Grand Canyon. Two botanists, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, wanted to be the first ones to do so. Melissa L. Sevigny’s new book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon offers the first comprehensive account of their historic trip down the Colorado River, surveying the botany of the Canyon.

Sevigny provides a brief background of the field of botany and women’s roles in the field, as well as the backgrounds of both Clover and Jotter. Clover dreamt of doing a field study of all of the cacti in the Southwest, and eventually she got a private sponsor who enabled her to spend two weeks in Utah doing so. While there, she met the host of a local lodge, Norman Nevills, who also worked as a river guide on the Colorado River—a river that flowed into the Grand Canyon, where no botanist had fully explored. Over conversation one night, Clover and Nevills discussed going into the Canyon to get cacti for research, and slowly, a plan took shape.

The final expedition group consisted of Clover, Jotter, and a zoologist named Eugene Atkinson, along with two boatmen and their expedition guide, Nevills. Newspaper articles were full of misinformation, describing the women as archaeologists, and much of the information about their plans for scientific research was left out, instead describing their duties as cooking and setting up camp.

The trip itself wasn’t easy: There were rapids, mishaps, falls overboard, and plenty of challenges and interpersonal clashes. Nevills got annoyed with some of his traveling companions—ironically, it was the men he had problems with—and he wrote, “The women are standing up beautifully so far.” Perhaps this amicability was because the women had vowed not to complain about any of their challenges or hardships, including any injuries they sustained.

One theory that the two botanists wanted to explore while in the Canyon was the idea at the time that the Colorado River acted as a corridor for plant migration. Along the river, in the Canyon, there are three different deserts: the Great Basin, the Sonoran, and the Mojave; Clover was interested in seeing whether plants unique to each area were also found along the river channel. They also knew that plant communities change depending on the elevation, and they planned to examine these changes as they proceeded on their river trip. Finally, they wanted to see if there were any “relict flora,” or plants leftover from previous eras that had managed to survive the changing climates over time. To do all of these things, Clover and Jotter would have to collect plants at every stage of their trip, all the way down the river, to get a full idea of what constituted the Canyon’s ecology.

In the 1930s, the eugenics movement was underway and Jim Crow laws were rampant; racism profoundly influenced science at the time. Sevigny does not hesitate to write about the racist history of science, botany, and the national parks: “Plant collectors in the United States, meanwhile, turned around this superior attitude toward Indigenous peoples in every country, including their own, dismissing local knowledge of plants in an eagerness to ‘discover’ species. The field of botany suffered because of racism and colonialism.” Although Sevigny doesn’t dig into an analysis of how Clover and Jotter may have enabled or pushed back against this unwelcoming climate, she does describe the sexism that Clover and Jotter faced, not just from the media and the public, but even from the men on their rafting expedition. In addition to their own fieldwork, Clover and Jotter were also expected to prepare the meals for the group. While dismaying, it was also refreshing to see this history laid bare, without glossing over the bigotry and misogyny of that time, illustrating what marginalized and progressive scientists experienced on a regular basis.

The botany they ended up cataloging over the years following the expedition was so diverse that they charted various habitats and the plants associated with each. Clover and Jotter published the complete plant list in 1944 in the American Midland Naturalist. It detailed more than 400 species and has been cited more than 70 times since publication.

Clover became the first woman in the botany department to earn full professorship at the University of Michigan, and she never brought up that she was the first woman who traveled down the Colorado River—in fact, whenever it was brought up, she took pains to say that “she and Jotter had been the first non-Native women to boat the Grand Canyon.” Jotter married, changing her name to Jotter Cutter, and finished her PhD. She eventually worked in the biology department as an assistant professor at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina, after her husband died in 1962. She created curricula for environmental science classes and taught her children about the outdoors, instilling a love for nature in them. Ensuring that people received a good environmental education was a passion of hers. She even returned to the Canyon in 1994 at the age of 80, on a trip funded by the Bureau of Reclamation’s Glen Canyon Environmental Studies program, to assess ecological changes.

The book blends reportage, research, and science writing as Sevigny recounts the way the media sensationalized the trip, the institutional barriers Clover and Jotter faced with funding and advancement, attitudes of fellow colleagues and travelers, and the botanical work done on the trip, along with the experience of navigating the river. I do wish there had been more of a focus on the botany and any new discoveries they made, as well as more about their work after they got back from the trip. Written for a general audience, the larger context of the trip is the focus of the book. Overall, this book is a compelling and important addition to the literature about the botany of the Grand Canyon, as well as a long-overdue homage to Lois Jotter and Elzada Clover.