Spend your holiday season with Clover and Jotter. You won't regret it.
Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of The Grand Canyon, Melissa L. Sevigny
BRAVE THE WILD RIVER is the ideal 2024 holiday read. Read it to gab about, read it to inform your present with the past, buy it for everyone on your list.
BRAVE is about a 1938 trip down the Colorado River organized by the multi-talented botanist and general badass Dr. Elzada Clover and go-getter motelier* Norm Nevills. Clover wanted to ‘botanize’ the Grand Canyon. She applied to her employer the University of Michigan for funding and recruited Lois Jotter, a friend finishing her PhD in botany, to join. Nevills had ambitions of guiding commercial trips through the Grand Canyon and thought making a trip with two women would drum up publicity.
Public and private skepticism abounded. Hardly anyone was supportive of Clover and Jotter making the trip. Not Clover’s boss. Not Jotter’s family. Especially not people (i.e. men) famous for having made the trip before. They thought it was reckless to take women down the Colorado. They shared these thoughts freely in national publications.
Although it looked touch and go for a bit, Nevills rounds up enough people to row the three boats he made. (Truly, when I learn about people who make their own boats, the incredulity and admiration center in my brain goes haywire.)
Central to the book is that while Clover and Jotter’s focus was on science, everyone else’s (e.g., the reporters who met them at Lee’s Ferry, the first stopping point) was on their gender. Botany got short shrift in the reporting. On the river Clover and Jotter worked early in the morning and late at night to collect their samples. Before and after they handled the food preparation for the rest of the crew. In other words, they did everything the men did and also more stuff.
BRAVE delivered for me: women in science, environmental protections, evidence-informed governance, blowhards, misinformation. Put another way, what might ail you in 2024 was there in 1938. Hence the genius of BRAVE as your 2024 Holiday Book. You can bemoan the above without saying one word about contemporary anything.
I took a hardback library copy of BRAVE on an airplane. (In other words, a big bet. I had to bring it home whether I liked it or not.) I’m so glad I did. By the end I was greedy for every word. I read each source note and blurb. I cried multiple times. I bought a copy for my dad (and told my cousin to buy one for my aunt).
Go get this book already!
Looking ahead: More women on rivers in 2025!
BRAVE got me even more excited for river guide Bridget Crocker’s forthcoming memoir THE RIVER’S DAUGHTER (June 2025). Available for pre-order (or requesting from your library) now.
Tell me, what book are you gifting or gabbing about?
Happy reading.
*Nevills owned the Mexican Hat Lodge in Mexican Hat, Utah. I’m calling it a motel.
Bookshop link to BRAVE
Care to join me down the rabbit hole?
https://mbgna.umich.edu/post/down-river-elzada-clover
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grand-canyon-plants-botany-elzada-clover-lois-jotter
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-first-two-botanists-who-surveyed-and-survived-the-colorado-river/
https://melissasevigny.com/books/brave-the-wild-river/
The daughter of a writer in my[our] co-writing group wrote a review of this book, as well! https://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/books/a-tale-of-two-trailblazers/article_202b2862-8af5-11ee-8963-836f99af32f5.html
Oh! I'm so glad you reviewed this! I've been thinking of buying it for over a year, since I first heard of it somehow, but never did because so, so many books. But my grandparents were both botanists (grandfather taught at Tulane while grandmother collaborated from home and attended to the kids - at least she did get a few bylines) and obv these women are badasses, so this has nudged me.