Brad Dimock's exhaustive biography of Bert Loper — gold prospector, early Colorado River boatman, and one of the great stubborn characters of Western river history — who died in Grand Canyon at 79, alone in his boat in a rapid, on the river he refused to leave. The definitive account of the Colorado River's pioneer running era.
Brad Dimock's biography of Bert Loper is one of the most specific, patient, and affectionate pieces of river history in print. Loper was a gold prospector turned Colorado River boatman who spent something like fifty years on various stretches of the river and who died, at seventy-nine, running the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. Dimock's book is eight hundred pages. It took him roughly a decade to write. And every page of it is the kind of research-heavy, detail-rich, absolutely committed biographical work that almost nobody does anymore because the economics of publishing do not support it.
Loper was complicated. He was by some accounts an impossible man — stubborn to the point of self-injury, difficult with crews, married late, never quite financially stable, bad at most of the things a person is expected to be good at by middle age. He was also, and this is the book's argument, one of the true river originals. Dimock does not simplify him. The book shows you the cranky stubborn obsessive alongside the genuine talent, the long commitment, the decades of work on a river that most of his contemporaries treated as a curiosity.
I bring this book up when somebody asks me why river people are the way they are. The Loper story is a specific answer. The river attracts a certain kind of person — the person willing to organize an entire life around a specific piece of moving water — and Loper is the pattern. His half-century on the Colorado is the original template for the river-obsessed long-career boatman, and every subsequent lifer, commercial or private, is working out some variation of the same stubborn arrangement.
Dimock's research is the other reason to read the book. He interviewed everybody still alive who knew Loper. He read the letters. He crossreferenced the trip logs, the newspaper clippings, the oral histories. The citations are careful. The gaps are acknowledged. When the record is thin, Dimock says so. When he has to speculate, he flags the speculation. That methodological care is what makes the book a genuine contribution to river history rather than just a long piece of boatman lore.
Read it in winter. It is long, and it rewards patience, and the accumulation of Loper's life across the decades is a specific kind of reading pleasure that fast books do not provide. By the time you finish, you know Loper the way you know a grandfather — irritating, difficult, impossible to quite love or quite reject, but permanently part of the story you tell yourself about the family of river people you have joined.
