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

by Melissa Sevigny (W.W. Norton Press)

Join fellow RIWPS members on March 3 from 2 to 4 pm to discuss Brave the Wild River, the beautifully written adventure story of two women botanists running the untamed Colorado River.  Let’s share our thoughts.  Consider choosing a couple of quotes or passages that resonated with you. 

Elzada Clover was a cacti-loving native of the Southwest and a faculty member at University of Michigan where she taught Lois Jotter, a ready-for-adventure undergrad. In the summer of 1938, the two women planned a trip down the Colorado. No one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first. But the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world and they and their small crew of an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen were thought to be foolhardy.

 Word of the trip spread through the national press and the nation came alive with shock, censure, and negative attitudes, especially with the idea of two women alone with three men! 

Using the women’s journals, the scientist journalist Sevigny recounts their daring forty-three-day journey down the river, meticulously cataloging the plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon’s secret nooks and crannies. But Sevigny also includes bits of human history and culture, geography, politics and poetic descriptions of the rocky gorge. 

The satisfying ending wraps up the aftermath of the botanists’ results, their lives and an amazing opportunity for Jotter as an old woman. Today scientists use Clover and Jotter’s journals and plant lists to learn and compare today’s flora with what Clover and Jetter found in 1938.

• Winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography  • A Booklist Top of the List Winner for Nonfiction in 2023  • A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 •

Copies available in the Ocean State Library system and online.

This event is for RIWPS members.  Not a member?  JOIN NOW.  Not sure if your membership is current?  Contact office@RIWPS.org

To participate register below  (Directions to access this discussion will be sent to those who register closer to March 3).  As always, let us know if you need to cancel your registration. office@riwps.org