Biography

American botanist at the University of Michigan. Elzada Clover is famous for being the first woman to sail down the Grand Canyon. The seventh of nine children, she grew up on a farm in Auburn, southeastern Nebraska, which her parents had bought as undeveloped land in 1885. All of the children worked on the small farm although at the age of 13 Elzada was stricken for many months with rheumatic fever. Attending high school in the nearby town of Peru, she went on to train as a teacher there and in 1917 began to teach at a small school in Tekamah. The following year she transferred to the town of Gordon in the north of the state and here was a victim of an extremely serious bout of influenza. After seven years spent teaching in Texas (where her father had purchased a farm after the death of her mother) Elzada Clover returned to Peru where her school had become a State Teachers College. Enrolling there she received a BA degree in 1930 and matriculated into Michigan University at Ann Arbor, where she went on to receive an MA and PhD in botany. For her thesis Clover studied the vegetation of the lower Rio Grande Valley and was appointed an instructor in botany at the university in 1935, as well as assistant curator of its botanical gardens.

With her research and teaching focused on the Cactaceae, Clover was collecting cacti in the Colorado Plateau (Utah) in 1937 when her dreams of exploring the plants of the Grand Canyon first began to take shape. Meeting Norman Nevills, whose parents owned the lodge she was staying in, the pair made tentative plans to sail down the Colorado the following year. By the following June a team was assembled, consisting of Elzada, Norman, a painter named Mr. Gibson, a geological surveyor (Don Harris), a college student of Clover's named Eugene Atkinson and a botanical teaching assistant Lois Jotter. Travelling in boats built by Nevills and his father (named the Wen, the Botany and the Mexican Hat) the so-called 'Nevills Expedition' generated a great deal of publicity. Travelling from Green River in Utah to Lake Mead, Arizona, the journey took them 43 days. Harris and Atkinson left the expedition at Lees Bridge and were replaced by two adventurers. The team made many important scientific advances in the understanding of the canyon, although the breadth of their botanical collections was not quite what they or the University of Michigan had hoped for. The expedition is best known because Clover and Jotter became the first women to successfully navigate the Colorado (a honeymooning couple had attempted the journey in 1928 but were never seen again). Nevills went on to develop the first commercial tours of the canyon and paved the way for the hundred thousand or so tourists that now make the trip every year. Over the years that followed Clover rarely passed up an opportunity to give lectures on the expedition (furnished with a film of the trip) and when she did so always attracted a large audience.

Directly following the Nevills Expedition, Clover took a further journey down the San Juan and returned to Ann Arbor via Texas where she collected fossil plants. In 1939 she published an account of the expedition entitled "Danger Can Be Fun" and returned to Arizona that year to gather more plant specimens. After a month spent in Havasupai Canyon during which time she discovered a new species of cactus, Clover and Jotter published "Cacti of the Colorado River and Tributaries" in 1941. From this time onwards Clover abandoned her studies in the West and concentrated on trips to the deserts of Guatemala, Mexico and Haiti and published further works accordingly. On retiring she returned to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

Sources:
W. Cook, 1987, The Wen the Botany and the Mexican Hat
Lois Jotter Cutter Collection,1938-1995, Arizona Archives Online:
http://www.azarchivesonline.org/xtf/view?docId=ead/nau/Cutter_Lois.xml;query=;brand=default, accessed 13 April 2011.