Non-fiction Review: Brave the Wild River

Before I get to my review, I need to report that reality has struck and I've shifted my launch date back to August 25. With luck, I can actually get all the parts together by then! Why does every book take at least a long as the last? You'd think I'd get the system down and be faster at this!

 

Now, on to today's feature: a great book I got for Xmas, about the first botanists to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, collecting botanical samples all the way!

 

Title: Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

Author: Melissa L. Sevigny 

Publication Info: WW Norton, 2023. 290 pages in paperback.

Source: Xmas gift 

Publisher's Blurb:
In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off down the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious expedition leader and three amateur boatmen. With its churning rapids, sheer cliffs, and boat-shattering boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. But for Clover and Jotter, it held a tantalizing appeal: no one had surveyed the Grand Canyon’s plants, and they were determined to be the first.


Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their forty-three-day journey, during which they ran rapids, chased a runaway boat, and turned their harshest critic into an ally. Their story is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a little-known corner of the American West at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.
 

My Review:
The friend who gave me this book really knows me. It ticks all my boxes: the Canyon. Women's history. Science. Natural history. Adventures in the great outdoors. With all that going on, there is a risk of creating chaos in the effort to do everything. Sevigny for the most part avoids that pitfall, and returns us to the main narrative firmly after each foray into the history of the river, the landscape, the evolving science of botany, and peoples' lives.

Clover and Jotter undertook this survey at a time when women were barely accepted in science, with botany being considered okay, as long as they stuck with gardens and greenhouses. They were not at all welcome among the explorers. Clover had bigger ambitions and wasn't about to be prevented from doing what male scientists were doing: going out into the field, however challenging, and finding something new.

In 1938, no one had apparently even thought of looking at the ecology of the river as it ran through its deep canyons. Only a handful of people had run the river since John Wesley Powell's trips in 1868 and 1871-2, and none were women. Only one Anglo woman* had tried, and she and her husband never emerged from the canyon. I can imagine how the families of Clover and Jotter felt when they set out, and many people said it was absolutely no place for a woman.

There was, in fact, a firm conviction among most people that women could not handle the rigors of such an expedition. Even after what women did during WWI, woman (at least, white women from the middle and upper classes) were considered (or desired) to be fragile. This book shows that not only were the women fully capable of coping, but they handled the trip better than most of the men, holding up their share and more of camp chores (like cooking) while also getting up insanely early to collect their botanical samples.

Clover and Jotter didn't get much attention and even less credit at the time, but the survey they took laid down the baseline for all future work in the Canyon. And they may well have paved the way for a little bit more equality in society. Men still outnumber women working as river guides, but not by much, and no one questions the ability of women to run the river.

*We have no information on what the native peoples of the canyon might or might not have done, aside from considering it their home. 

My Recommendation:
A fascinating story of both the struggles of female scientists to be taken seriously, and of a trip down the river I wish I could experience, before the Glen Canyon Dam took some of the wild out of the Colorado. Highly recommended for all aficionados of the canyons, botany, or women in science.

 

Not sure which rapids; I failed to take good notes. Possibly not too different from what Clover and Jotter would have found.

Hermit Rapids. Spot the boat. You can see why this was unnerving for people in wooden boats without any good beta on the rapids!

 

TC Disclosure: I received a copy of Brave the Wild River as a gift, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."   

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2025   
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