“My life has been full of adventures but this sounded like the ace of them all.”

With a name like Elzada Urseba Clover, you’re either born to botanize or you're born for adventure -- and it turns out she was born to do both. Clover marked several firsts in her lifetime: She was the first recorded woman (with University of Michigan graduate student Lois Jotter) to run the Colorado River through the full length of the Grand Canyon. She was the first botanist to catalog the flora along the river in the Canyon. And she was the first woman to become a full professor in the University of Michigan Botany Department.

I happened upon Melissa Sevigny’s wonderful 2023 book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, and to my surprise, I learned that both Clover and Jotter were from the University of Michigan. I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for four decades yet this was the first I’d ever heard of them. As with many stories of women in science, their pioneering work was largely overlooked in their time and was unrecognized for decades.

Clover was 42 at the time of her Grand Canyon expedition, the oldest member of a six-person crew. She was born in Auburn, Nebraska on September 12, 1897, and later moved with her family to the southwest where she became fascinated by the plants of the region, especially cacti. Before coming to Ann Arbor, she taught public school in rural Nebraska and was the principal of a school in Texas. Sevigny described her as “...a tall woman, active, robust, dramatic, daring, perhaps just a little bit wicked. She drank whiskey. She could swim, fish, hunt, and ride a horse. She preferred to describe her own code of behavior as ‘gentlemanly’ rather than ‘ladylike.’”

“Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.”

Clover graduated from the Nebraska State Teachers College in 1930 and earned her Master of Science degree at the University of Michigan in 1932, followed by her PhD in 1935. Not long before the Grand Canyon trip, she’d been denied a faculty position at U-M. Her departmental appointment was no more permanent than instructor and her department chair Harley H. Bartlett confided in his diary that “Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.” Yet Clover wasn’t the kind of person to give up easily. So when she set her sights on cataloging the plant life of the Grand Canyon -- one of the few frontiers left to botanize -- she was determined to do it. “It has never been explored botanically and for that reason everything collected will be of interest,” she wrote. Clover’s goal was to gather specimens and document changes in plant life through the various elevations along the route into the river’s side canyons. 

Since hiking and riding horseback weren’t viable options, she knew she would need to raft the river. However, the prevailing viewpoint in 1938 was that the Colorado River was far too dangerous for anyone, let alone a woman. It had killed plenty of men who’d tried to run it, and the last woman to attempt it, Bessie Hyde in 1928, had disappeared with her husband on their honeymoon. Their bodies were never found. Perhaps because of these serious risks, the University of Michigan refused to sponsor the expedition. Still, Clover applied for a $400 grant from the Rackham Graduate School (they gave her $300) and chose a partner in Norman Nevills, an entrepreneur river runner she’d met by chance the previous summer. Nevills was living along the San Juan River near the remote outpost of Mexican Hat, Utah, and was looking to boost his profile as a river guide for tourists. Clover would therefore get to do her botanizing, yet it would be a commercial, rather than a university-sponsored, expedition. And she -- along with each crew member -- would need to come up with $400 to fund it.

Clover and Neville struck a deal: He would build and guide the boats, help drum up publicity, and bring a couple of men to help -- LaPhene “Don” Harris, a 26-year-old river runner for the US Geological Survey, and 24-year-old Bill Gibson, an amateur photographer who would film the trip. In turn, Clover would bring two students she was mentoring - a woman, Lois Jotter, age 24, in part for propriety since it would simply not do to be the only woman on an otherwise all-male trip; and 25-year-old Eugene Atkinson, a taxidermist working on his PhD in paleobotany at U-M. (At Lee’s Ferry, roughly halfway through the trip, tensions between the crew threatened to upend the expedition and led to the replacement of Harris and Atkinson with 44-year-old Del Reed and 24-year-old Lorin Bell.)

“The best man of the bunch”

The Colorado River was wilder and more unpredictable in 1938 than today. At the time of their trip, it was a raging torrent flowing at 70,000 cubic feet per second, full of scouring silt that clung to the body and clothes. The crew would drink unfiltered water and eat mostly canned food, though Atkinson would also shoot geese and deer along the way. They would face scorching 100-degree heat, risk rattlesnake bites and other potential life-threatening accidents with no feasible means of rescue -- as well as face the looming specter of the great unknown. As Sevigny points out, this was a period when people suspected there might still be undiscovered species of flora and fauna - potential primordial monsters - hidden down corridors of the Canyon. Clover and Jotter decided to don overalls (they considered jeans too masculine) and would take face cream and apply makeup through much of the journey before finally giving it up. 

The story of the two adventurous women spread quickly across the country, with breathless predictions and sensationalized front-page coverage -- some of it misleading or cynical. Several accounts failed to mention the science, focusing instead on the danger of the river and suggesting Clover and Jotter were attention-seeking “school ma’ams” willing to risk the entire crew for their notoriety. A male river runner interviewed by the press even worried that a successful run by women might diminish his reputation. Over 100 newspapermen and gawkers saw the expedition cast off at Green River, and when they were late for a midpoint rendezvous at Lee’s Ferry, there was a media frenzy and a search by a Coast Guard plane. Even a commercial TWA flight out of Los Angeles rerouted its course to look for the river runners. 

Yet on the river, Clover would leave the outside world behind. In the smooth-water section during the early part of the voyage, she floated along playing her harmonica, and her journal of the expedition delights in the beauty of the moon rising over the canyon wall or the wonder of a rainbow after a terrific electrical storm. She would prove to be the most reliable crew member -- Nevills referred to her as “the best man of the bunch” -- keeping her cool even as personalities clashed and tension built as they made their way deeper into the gorge and the more treacherous rapids known as the graveyard of the Colorado River. But despite Clover’s role as the scientific leader of the expedition, traditional sexism persisted: A typical 24-hour cycle saw her and Jotter setting up camp at night, waking up early the next day to gather and press their plant specimens -- all before the men were up and the journey continued. And it was just understood the women would do all the cooking. “The men depend on Lois and me for so many little things. Mirrors, combs, finding shirts, first aid, etc. Just as men always have since Adam,” Clover wrote.

The 43-day trip, lasting from June 20 through July 29 and covering over 600 miles, was a scientific success: Clover and Jotter mapped five different plant zones and were responsible for four first-discovered species (the Grand Canyon claret cup, the fishhook cactus, the strawberry hedgehog cactus, and beavertail prickly pear). Their survey is the only comprehensive one of the Colorado River’s riparian species before the building of Glen Canyon Dam. Nevertheless, Clover fretted over the quality of the specimens, as well as a plant press that went missing temporarily with over a third of the specimens gathered (it was found later that year and mailed to Ann Arbor). In a phone interview with Sevigny, she notes, “[Clover and Jotter] had some scientific complaints about the quality of the work they did. And I think that may have unintentionally contributed to this perception that their work wasn’t important. That [impression] lingered for decades. But this was absolutely untrue. They cataloged 400 species of plants. That’s half of all the plants we know along the river corridor today.”

“I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” 

When the trip ended, Clover fell into a melancholy funk. She missed her companions, retreating to her motel room to watch the films, dreaming of further adventures. And she missed the river adventure fiercely, noting in her diary, “I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” Almost immediately, she joined Nevills for another excursion, this time down the San Juan River, and she would continue her travels in the following years, surveying the region’s flora on foot and horseback while also making excursions to Texas and Guatemala. Regarding Clover’s wanderlust, Sevigny notes, “I think she belonged out in wild places and that’s where she was happiest.”

Despite the trip’s success -- and perhaps because of its notoriety -- Clover’s work prospects didn’t immediately improve upon returning to Ann Arbor. Sevigny continues: “I think the sensational nature of the publicity did quite a lot of damage to Elzada’s career. She wanted any publicity to be very dignified and very focused on the scientific work.” Clover gave lectures and showed her films to several groups -- women’s clubs, schools, and church groups -- and in 1944, she and Jotter finally completed their species list and published it in the American Midland Naturalist, an influential paper on Southwest plants. Some of their specimens were also given to the Smithsonian’s National Herbarium. 

But there was a notable lack of recognition for Clover’s pioneering work at the University of Michigan, and both she and Jotter were somewhat disinclined to discuss their trip with either family or friends. “I think they were proud of what they did,” said Sevigny. “But I think it wasn’t in Elzada’s personality to go around and crow about it. There were little things like, for example, she didn’t insist on being called Dr. Clover in the press. I think their honesty about the scientific challenges they faced and their reluctance to speak publicly about what they had accomplished might have contributed to people not knowing what an extraordinary thing they had done.” As to their being the first known women to successfully take a boat down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, Sevigny points out that Clover was always careful to say she and Jotter were the first non-indigenous women to boat the Canyon. She was respectful of and interested in the indigenous cultures that preceded her in the places she visited, including the Havasupai and Navajo peoples. 

To Clover’s great frustration - one that followed her all her life - national wire stories would depreciate her and Jotter's scientific achievements and continue to focus on their gender and age. A former river runner described Clover as a “middle-aged woman who has lost her way in life” and a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article described Clover as a spinster looking for a last adventure. “The story depressed and infuriated Clover,” Sevigny writes. “Her work as a respected university professor had been reduced to bedtime stories for children, and instead of an accomplished scientist and explorer, she was depicted as an aging spinster with a life empty of meaning.” 

“Everything is so big and timeless there it makes so many worries and things here seem so petty.”

Yet Clover would funnel her passion into further botany, travel -- and teaching, eventually rising through the ranks at the University of Michigan. She became a curator at the University’s botanical gardens in 1957 (as well as the first U-M instructor to teach a class there) and she became the first woman in the U-M Botany department to earn a full professorship, serving from 1960-1967. By all accounts, she was excellent at her job. One of Clover’s former students, Jane Myers, penned an eloquent tribute to her in the Ann Arbor News when Clover died, and she recalled Clover’s infectious passion for plants and her memorable teaching style: “She was somebody with such intense interest in all things botanical that you did not want to disappoint her. She was not tough on her students—just always intense. Very quietly.” Clover also held small gatherings of students at her upstairs apartment at 1522 Hill Street.

Myers further notes: “In my class out at the greenhouses of the Botanical Gardens in their old 1950s setting, Dr. Clover had us make wire balls with soil in the middle into which we stuck many African violet plants. My mother loved it! There was nothing academic about it; it was just an imaginative use of plants. I think she was ahead of any educational trend by years. She wanted us to enjoy plants as much as she did.” During a book talk at the U-M Biological Station in Pellston, Michigan, where Clover frequently taught, Sevigny met two other former students of Clover’s, and their recollections echo Myers: “Her whole life was about plants. They both said that it changed their lives to absorb some of that passion for the natural world.”

After retiring from the University of Michigan in 1967, Clover moved to San Juan, Texas. On November 2, 1980, she died in McAllen, Texas, close to the Mexico border. Despite all the obstacles she faced, Elzada Clover dared to undertake both an epic adventure and a career path that up to that point had been exclusively the domain of men. “Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs,” writes Sevigny. “They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake.”

The same can be said of Elzada Clover herself. Her legacy is the cacti and succulent room at the University’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, which was seeded by her southwest collections, and her over 300 specimens in the University of Michigan Herbarium.