Away to the bare sands of the rare blowout penstemon. Away to the fossilized footprints of dinosaurs. Away to waterfalls and windstorms, deep soil prairies and scalding canyons, tarantulas and snow melt, land stories and forgotten histories. Away to the glorious and forgotten grassland rivers of America.
That is the subtitle to George Frazier’s new book, Riverine Dreams. “Away” echoes throughout: away as in wayfinding, discovering, celebrating. Away to the past and heading toward the future. The book is a riveting exploration of the rivers that have shaped our Midwest / Great Plains / Prairie lands and cultures here in the center of the country.
With Frazier, rivers become more than conduits for water. They are places rich with personal and social narratives. They are lifeways for creatures, land and people. Each grassland river Frazier explores — the Missouri, Grand, Kansas (Kaw), Purgatoire, South Platte and Niobrara — holds the scars of mistreatment but also the resilience of healing. In this book, he miraculously explores it all.
Riverine Dreams is an open-hearted labor of love. Frazier visits these grassland rivers with joy, maybe even compulsion, over the course of years. He is not an adventurer in the cynical, social media sense, or even the “dirtbag” outdoorsy way of previous generations. Each chapter dedicated to its own river makes clear that we are alongside him during precious vacation days and between life’s adult obligations. This book took time. Lots of it. Frazier is driven by curiosity; he avoids the professorial trailblazing by bringing the reader along with him as he asks questions, searches for hours and finds what he is looking for. As all outdoor explorers know, failure is also a large part of the game, and Frazier has his share of that as well. Canoes are lost and plans are altered. I won’t provide an example here, because the camaraderie that is built by the mishaps in exploration is better achieved when you hear the story in full. Frazier brings his good humor with him everywhere he goes.
Grassland rivers are dynamic, and each chapter contains multitudes. Take the chapter on the Kaw River, for example. Officially named the Kansas River, it is the longest true grassland river in North America. Frazier writes about the geography of the Kaw and its tributaries across Kansas that make up its immense watershed. He shows us the ecology and explains the transgressions that have been made against it. And he highlights the advocacy and education of organizations like Friends of the Kaw that are making strides to better the health of the river.
Frazier also interviews and credits his fellow scholars who have done the work of researching these rivers. His conversation with historian Barbara Higgins-Dover, combined with Frazier’s own research, uplifts the people who once made their livelihoods by catching monstrous catfish along the Kaw. Abe Burns in particular should be nominated to the American folk hero canon. His method of diving, hand-hooking and out-swimming the “centrifugal death trap” along the dam in Lawrence is as miraculous as riding a tornado or clearing a forest with one swing. And Burns did it for real. Daily.
Although Riverine Dreams rivers are grass land rivers, they are as vast and strange from one another as they are alike. The Purgatoire — is there a more poetic name for a river? — intermittently flows so shallow that Frazier has to walk his exploration. Whereas the Kaw holds giant catfish, true dinosaurs once walked along the Purgatoire, leaving their bones and massive footsteps. The Cheyenne peoples called the river Hōtoănă’ohe, or Difficult River (again, poetic), and later Spanish explorers called it El Río de Las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio — the River of Lost Souls. All of this is to say, the Purgatoire holds water in a tough land, an arid shortgrass prairie of cactus, spiders and ghosts.
The Purgatoire chapter is also an uplifting one of resilience. When the U.S. government George Frazier. Photo courtesy of Chloe Frazier. moved to overtake the area for military operations, and thereby close the river from environmental protections, a small group of people fought back. They won in court; eventually the Army dropped plans to expand training maneuvers in the area. “Don’t ever think for a minute that a small group of people can’t make a significant difference,” said Robert Herrell, one of the winning plaintiffs. “The three of us took the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense to court. And we won.” This is the good news readers today need to hear.
With deep emotion for the life-giving rivers of our region, Riverine Dreams is a book of celebration. “My heart thick with the river,” Frazier notes as he points his canoe toward a confluence. It’s this thick heart that drives Frazier: he is an obsessive in the purest sense, patient and curious, an intentional listener eager to hear and honor the thousands of stories that these grassland watersheds hold.