Clover and Jotter's paper "Floristic Studies of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River" was received by the American Midland Naturalist, the first complete plant catalog of the region.
On January 30, 1939, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter submitted their manuscript, "Floristic Studies of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River," to the journal American Midland Naturalist. This submission represented the culmination of months of painstaking work analyzing, pressing, identifying, and cataloguing the hundreds of plant specimens collected during their perilous 1938 river expedition.
The manuscript compiled what would become the first complete scientific catalog of flora along the Colorado River corridor through the Grand Canyon. Prior to this work, no systematic botanical survey of this remote and difficult-to-access ecosystem had existed, leaving a significant gap in the scientific understanding of the canyon's plant communities.
Submitting scientific work of this caliber was itself an accomplishment for two women scientists in the late 1930s, an era in which women faced substantial barriers to being taken seriously in academic and field science. Clover, as a University of Michigan faculty member, and Jotter, her graduate student, pressed forward despite the sensationalized media coverage of their river trip that often overshadowed the rigor of their scientific contributions.
This submission date marks a pivotal moment bridging their physical exploratory achievement with lasting scientific documentation, ensuring their work would be preserved and built upon by future generations of botanists studying the Grand Canyon.