THEY ENTERED, AT LAST, the Grand Canyon. The date was July 13, 1938. Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, two botanists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, had started down the river 23 days earlier with three boats and four amateur boatmen, none of whom had run the Grand Canyon before. Pale, water-pocked ledges of Kaibab limestone rose out of the Colorado, laid down 270 million years ago when the desert was a sea.
Had they been geologists, they would have marveled at their plunge into the past, each river mile eating away another chunk of history, 10,000 years with every splash of the oars. There were secrets to be told here: about past climates, warm shallow seas, the inexorable work of uplift and erosion, and the catastrophic clawing of landslides and floods.
But Clover and Jotter had come to find plants, and to make the first botanical study of the Grand Canyon in Western science. Jotter dismissed the entire spectacle of stone in a journal she kept during the trip with the scribble, “nice clouds and red cliffs.”
There were many stories about the Grand Canyon. Some of them were true. People said that if you traveled too deep into the chasm, you could look up at midday and see the stars. It was rumored that whole plateaus inside of the canyon had been cut off from the outside world for so long that primordial monsters still roamed there, relics of a ferocious past. The few non-Indigenous expeditions that had ventured inside — a few by river, the others on foot — came out with more fancy than fact. They spoke of a fabulously rich silver mine that nobody could find, and herds of feral horses no bigger than coyotes. They told campfire stories of a petrified man whose form shone out clearly from the canyon wall — and why not? The sculpted stone, sometimes, did look like it was trying to form living shapes, fluted into scales or fur by the constant wear of water.
Many people talked about the oppressive, claustrophobic feeling of the walls closing in overhead, blotting out sunlight, casting long purple shadows over the endlessly churning river. “The Grand Canyon of Arizona,” wrote John L. Stoddard, “is Nature wounded unto death and lying stiff and ghastly, with a gash 200 miles in length and a mile in depth in her bared breast.” That was one description in a collection of essays published by the Santa Fe Railroad in 1902. The book was meant to promote tourism, a plan that may have backfired, because none of the writers could agree on whether the Grand Canyon was gorgeous or horrifying. C.A. Higgins called it a “chaotic under-world, just emptied of primeval floods.” Another visitor summed up his experience in a burst of feeling: “Horror! Tragedy! Silence! Death! Chaos!”
Jotter had dismissed these overblown descriptions before the
