Jean Westwood called herself an unintentional pioneer. Although she worked hard to achieve what she did, she did not actively seek or expect to reach what was arguably the most powerful political position any American woman had ever held, chair of the national Democratic Party.

A Utah national committeewoman and member of the reform committee that reorganized the party, Westwood answered George McGovern’s call to lead his presidential campaign. In the dramatic year of 1972, she became “chairman” of the party, McGovern lost in a landslide, Nixon was reelected, and a covert operation burglarized Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate.

Westwood provides an inside account of a period that reshaped national politics. Second-wave feminism—“women’s liberation”—and the civil rights and antiwar movements opened the way. As a major player in political reform, Jean Westwood both helped build that road and traveled it.

The passage of the 1902 Reclamation Act created a mandate for the federal government to build dams on the Colorado River and its powerful tributaries. By 1920 the US Geological Survey had surveyed the river’s main courses, but still needed accurate charts of the last stretches of deep canyons and white-water rapids, accessible only by boat.Rough-Water Man is the first detailed account of these mapping expeditions by the USGS—the San Juan Canyon in 1921, the upper Green River in 1922, and the Grand Canyon in 1923. Illustrated throughout with period photographs, it is also the personal story of twenty-four-year-old Henry Elwyn Blake Jr., the only boatman to crew on each of the three trips, evolving from novice waterman to expert rapids runner. Drawing on Blake’s diaries, as well as the writings of other USGS surveyors, Rough-Water Man conveys the danger and hardships of navigating these waters with heavy wooden boats and oars. Even today, in rubber pontoons, traversing these canyons is an awesome and exhilarating experience. When Blake and his companions surveyed it, the Colorado ran free and wild from Wyoming to the Sea of Cortez. Westwood gives us mile-by-mile and day-by-day accounts of running these rapids before their canyons were flooded and waters tamed, before the rivers had ever been charted.

Georgie White Clark-adventurer, raconteur, eccentric--first came to know the canyons of the Colorado River by swimming portions of them with a single companion. She subsequently hiked and rafted portions of the canyons, increasingly sharing her love of the Colorado River with friends and acquaintances. At first establishing a part-time guide service as a way to support her own river trips, she went on to become perhaps the canyons' best-known river guide, introducing their rapids to many others-on the river, via her large-capacity rubber rafts, and across the nation, via magazine articles and movies. Georgie Clark saw the river and her sport change with the building of Glen Canyon Dam, enormous increases in the popularity of river running, and increased National Park Service regulation of rafting and river guides. Adjusting, though not always easily, to the changes, she helped transform an elite adventure sport into a major tourist activity.