Brave the Wild River
The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
by Melissa L. Sevigny
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Pub Date 23 May 2023 | Archive Date 30 Apr 2023
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Description
The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon.
In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, 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 daring forty-three-day journey down the river, during which they meticulously cataloged the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon’s secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river’s most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river runners into an ally. Clover and Jotter’s plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystem.
Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.
About the Author: Melissa L. Sevigny is a science journalist at KNAU (Arizona Public Radio). She has worked in in water policy, sustainable agriculture, and space exploration, and is the author of Brave the Wild River, Under Desert Skies, and Mythical River.
Advance Praise
"Brave the Wild River is everything a book should be, at once a biography, a thriller, and a vivid piece of science writing. In Melissa L. Sevigny’s breathtaking prose, the legendary Grand Canyon comes alive in honey mesquite, riparian forests, and desert blooms. Sevigny defines the wild as a ‘place that changes us,’ and she has written a book that is destined to permanently alter the way you see the world." - Nathalia Holt, best-selling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls
"Melissa L. Sevigny unfurls one of the finest river stories of the Grand Canyon while presenting a long overdue, richly deserved, and beautifully written tribute to a pair of legendary botanists who peeled back the petals of a mysterious, intoxicating landscape and made it blossom with new knowledge and wonder." - Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile
"Whip-smart, funny, meticulously researched, and beautifully written, Brave the Wild River is required reading for anyone interested in the Grand Canyon, river running, or the ingenuity of plants. It examines the challenges women in science faced in the 1930s—and still face today—but above all it’s a story about what it means to risk everything, to follow your heart into the great unknown." - Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring
"Melissa Sevigny embroiders the Grand Canyon with plants who become as much characters as the people. She tells a ripping story, full of heart and grit, and a river readers will take in the teeth." - Craig Childs, author of Atlas of a Lost World
"Melissa Sevigny, a rising star in science writing, has written a captivating book that journeys through the American West in company of two intrepid women botanists. This is a book celebrating women in science, particularly those adventurers who defied the bounds imposed on their gender to encounter the natural world in its wild power and beauty. This book redefines the Grand Canyon not as testing ground for masculine virility but as proving ground for women’s tenacity and intelligence. Brave the Wild River, filled with adventure and fresh seeing, makes a superb contribution to literature of the American West." - Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World
"Telling the story of Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter’s expedition in vivid, riveting detail, Melissa L. Sevigny makes the Colorado River’s Grand Canyon ecosystem come alive. At a time when the Colorado River is at a crisis point, Brave the Wild River provides a captivating narrative of Clover and Jotter’s important scientific contributions along with fascinating historical details." - Christie Aschwanden, best-selling author of Good to Go
"What a joy to venture down the canyons with two new heroines so ahead of their time. A remarkable tale masterfully told. I loved every page." - Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780393868234 |
| PRICE | US$30.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 304 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Christy H, Reviewer
This is a story of adventure, pushing boundaries, disregarding gender norms, and setting historical precedents. Within 300 pages, you are taken through a death-defying journey of the little-explored rapids of the Colorado river, you eddy at times over botanical descriptives and ecological backdrops before shoring up to learn more about the history of environmental science and the Grand Canyon National Park.
In 1938 Elazada Clover and Lois Jotter join four other men, across three boats, to journey 600 miles down the Colorado river in the hope of collecting and surveying its plant life. For the women, this trip was to provide an exciting opportunity to further their studies and contribute to the fast-evolving science of botany. The men too, each had their own agendas in making the trip. However, only one man, the expedition leader, had any sort of rafting experience. In fact, by 1938, there had only been about a dozen trips made, since it was first attempted some 70 years prior. That small handful of successful expeditions contained only men. When the rafting party set out, the media ran riot with harbingers of disaster and death and the complete foolhardiness of women being allowed at all, 'Women have their place in the world, but they do not belong in the Canyon of the Colorado'. Unfortunately, this dramatic publicity overshadowed and virtually dismissed the science that initiated the endeavour. It did not, however, preclude the two women from carefully documenting and collecting the plants; work which proved invaluable as future generations sought to redress the balance of the river's ecosystem. 'Before them, men...saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system....'
Melissa Sevigny really brought this story to life with her descriptive and evocative language. A story that could have been bogged down with botanical, Latin names, is given context and life as we ride down the rapids and learn the history of the place. The grandiose achievement of Clover and Jotter being the first white women to have successfully journeyed down the Colorado river is nicely tempered with the value of their resulting scientific contribution. This book pleasantly surprised me and I'd recommend it to not just readers interested in science and botany but to anyone who enjoys women's non-fiction and their stories.
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