BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: The untold story of two women who mapped the botany of the Grand Canyonby Melissa L. Sevigny
Let’s begin this story on a sun-drenched evening in August 1938. A small group of adventurers had just completed a 43-day journey from Utah to Nevada—although “journey” may be too tame a description for a journey that had taken weeks. small wooden boats that tumble over more than 600 miles of rock-strewn rivers. The purpose was twofold. First, just to survive. And then to map the plants that build houses along the jagged walls of the Grand Canyon.
Upon arrival in Boulder City, the group—four skippers and two female botanists—was battered, sunburned and grubby. The travelers were greeted by a throng of curious locals and journalists, less interested in the men than in these unusual women who plied rivers and ravines in search of science. “Women take perilous journey through Colorado Gorges,” marveled one headline, over a story that described them as “schoolgirls” with “copper cheeks.” Upon arrival, a photographer insisted on posing one of the two University of Michigan scientists, Lois Jotter, as best she could with a powder puff and hand mirror.
Jotter and her mentor, Elzada Clover, were used to it. Their journey along the Green and Colorado Rivers through the Grand Canyon had captured public attention from the start. Press coverage was tinged with disbelief; one newspaper emphatically quoted an experienced river man as warning that the Colorado River was “an immensely poor place for women.” The stories were often delivered in such a nasty tone that Jotter’s alarmed family wrote to her, fearing for her life.
Botany itself was once considered a safe field for women, Melissa L. Sevigny notes in her cascade of a story, colored by sun and water and driven by courage and determination. The 1833 American textbook “Botany for Beginners” was written by an amateur naturalist, Almira Phelps, who argued that the study of pretty flowers and delicate stems was “particularly suited to women.”
But as plants were increasingly sought after in wilder landscapes, such ideas began to change. In 1887, Science magazine urged its male readers to look beyond botany’s reputation as the preserve of “young ladies and effeminate youth.” And as a new distinctive profession, botany soon became male territory. Founded in 1893, the Botanical Society of America admitted only one woman, Elizabeth Britton, who helped found the New York Botanical Garden and was a pioneering researcher of the biology of mosses.
So when Elzada Clover received her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Michigan in 1935, she was unable to find a job. One of her professors, Harley H. Bartlett, recognizing her intelligence and admiring her perseverance, wrote unhappily in his journal, “Elzada is not wanted because she is a woman.” In the end, Bartlett, the head of the school’s botany department, managed to keep Clover in an entry-level faculty position.
When she began proposing ambitious projects — most notably a plan to map the Grand Canyon’s botany several years later — he moved to help her get funding. “I wouldn’t hesitate to do it myself,” he wrote. “So why would I refuse my endorsement for her?” When Clover was asked to choose another scientist for the trip, she chose one of her favorite graduate students, Lois Jotter, who was pursuing a PhD with a specialty in plant genetics.
As they traveled west, they brought with them a shared determination to work hard and prove their worth, both as scientists and crew members. They cooked and cleaned, carried, stowed and paddled alongside their boatmates. But Clover and Jotter also spent hours on walks collecting hundreds of plant samples to create a new detailed portrait of the gallery of cacti, wildflowers, thorny grasses and wind-etched trees that prevailed and even thrived. in an often hostile environment. landscape. That work would change the way botanists thought about the distribution of life through the Grand Canyon, and serve to identify more than 400 plant ranges in the region.
The pair worried that, thanks to the dubious publicity about women, they would be best remembered as women in the making rather than pioneering scientists. But they agreed that they didn’t care; they would continue to explore and further explain plant life in the West for decades to come. Clover stayed in Michigan and Jotter moved to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro after graduating, where she would eventually teach. And in the end their painstaking science would prevail; their papers, as one federal investigator stated, would become “benchmarks in botanical research along the Colorado River.”
They have not actually been forgotten, as the subtitle of Sevigny’s book suggests. Every woman has a Wikipedia entry; their journey is the subject of a long story by the University of Michigan Heritage Project titled “River Rat” and a 1987 book, “The Wen, the Botany and the Mexican Hat.” Sevigny himself wrote an account of the journey some five years ago for The Atavist, an award-winning article called ‘The Wild Ones’, which served as the basis for this book. And, of course, their trip was front-page news at the time.
Not only the story, but also the way it is told is important here. Unlike those old newspaper reporters, Sevigny doesn’t look at her subjects and see women out of place. She sees women doing their job and doing it well. She muses fondly on that shift in perspective, while acknowledging (rightly) that women in the modern profession of science still face serious gender barriers.
Still, Clover and Jotter and their 1930s exploits remain relevant. Their example does not fade with time, Sevigny emphasises. They remind us of the power of courage and fortitude and that people with such qualities can change our ideas about the natural world – and our place in it. Then consider them as guides. “Like stars reflected in the river,” she writes, “they show the way.”
Deborah Blum, the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, is the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”
BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: The untold story of two women who mapped the botany of the Grand Canyon | By Melissa L. Sevigny | Illustrated | 290 pp. | WW Norton & Company | $30