Woman of the River: Georgie White Clark, White-Water Pioneer by Richard E. Westwood (review)

b o o k R e v i e w s Dodge’s particular interests in hunting, fishing, and scenery enliven his nar­ rative as do the politics dividing the miners from the Indians and the sol­ diers from the scientists on the expedition. Dodge published two books about the West. The first one was The Plains of North America and Their Inhabitants (1875), which was issued in England as The Hunting Grounds of the Great West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876), and Putnam’s Sons issued it in 1877 under the title The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. Drawing upon his journals for his second work, the slim volume issued in 1876 was titled The Black Hills, A Minute Description of the Routes, Scenery, Soil, Climate, Timber, Gold, Geology, Etc. The Powder River Expedition Journals comprise four journals, and Kime notes that the “entries begin on October 31, 1876, and end on January 8, 1877.” These “recount Dodge’s experiences as commander of the infantry and artillery battalions in the Powder River Expedition under General George Crook” (xi). The Powder River Expedition was a decisive campaign that helped end the Great Sioux War, and Kime notes that “Dodge was the highest ranking officer in the campaign who set down a separate written record of it” (xii). Unpublished are eight journals dated between September 18, 1878, and December 18, 1880, which center on his establishing and commanding a sixcompany post in Indian Territory known as Cantonment North Fork Canadian River. The final two entries are from June 23 and September 28, 1883, and record his observations as former aide-de-camp to William T. Sherman, gen­ eral of the army, in Sherman’s tour of military operations in the West. The manuscript journals of Richard Irving Dodge form part of the Edward D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago. The published journals have a wealth of information that will surely prove useful to students of the Great Sioux War, a subject that seems never ending to historians of the period. Woman of the River: Qeorgie White Clark, White-Water Pioneer. By Richard E. Westwood. Logan: U tah State University Press, 1997. 304 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Verne Huser Albuquerque Academy I have spent the past week with Georgie White Clark, vicariously raft­ ing the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon by reading her recent biography, Woman of the River by Richard E. Westwood. Isn’t it ironic that I finished the book on the sixth anniversary of her death, which occurred on May 12, 1992? It’s always interesting to read a biography of someone you knew; before you open the book, you wonder if the biographer got it right. While this book gave me much new information and many new insights, W A L 34(1) S p r in g 1999 for the most part, it got her right, presenting Clark’s dark side and the light, her foibles and follies. Clark began running the Colorado in 1945 by swimming the lower few dozen miles of the Grand Canyon with a friend. By 1953, she was leading cost-sharing trips through the canyon in military surplus rafts, an activity that soon led to low-cost commercial operations. She ultimately became one of the biggest commercial river outfitters in the Grand Canyon, a pio­ neer of the business. But Clark definitely had a dark side, despite all her fame and frivolity. Westwood acknowledges that “Georgie had a tendency to leave out any bad things that occurred on her trips” and that she was “a storyteller who sel­ dom let the truth get in the way of a good story” (78-79). When something went wrong, “Georgies reaction . . . was to pretend it hadn’t happened” (106). While I never took a trip with her, I knew her through the Western River Guides Association, of which we were both members for a dozen years, and I’ve seen her motor-powered behemoths blasting their way through the river’s mighty rapids when I was on the Colorado. Singer/songwriter Katie Lee wrote one of her more popular songs about Clark, and it isn...