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Riverine Dreams
The inspirational story of grassland rivers—and the people who paddle and protect them.
The North American grasslands that once covered vast areas of the central United States are now our most endangered ecosystems. But not far from any spot in the grasslands is a river. Grassland rivers are as central to the story of prairies as bison and bluestem. Defined as rivers that drain prairie watersheds, these waterways are crucial to plains ecosystems and no less endangered than the grasslands surrounding them. They are also some are restricted by local access laws and others have simply been forgotten. In any given year, fewer than a dozen people might lay eyes on tens of thousands of miles of America’s grassland rivers. But, as environmental writer George Frazier shows, following their twists and turns is one of the best ways to experience the wild essence of the prairies.
Riverine Dreams invites us on a trip along eight grassland rivers—including the Missouri, the Niobrara, and Purgatoire—traversing their environmental and cultural histories and introducing us to the people who study, paddle, and conserve them. This journey takes Frazier across the North American interior—from Montana and Colorado to Nebraska and Missouri—where he uncovers a remarkable movement to celebrate and preserve these natural nothing less than a grassland river revival.
The first accessible introduction to these waters, Riverine Dreams is a personal exploration of the rivers that are so vital to the health of the prairies.
The North American grasslands that once covered vast areas of the central United States are now our most endangered ecosystems. But not far from any spot in the grasslands is a river. Grassland rivers are as central to the story of prairies as bison and bluestem. Defined as rivers that drain prairie watersheds, these waterways are crucial to plains ecosystems and no less endangered than the grasslands surrounding them. They are also some are restricted by local access laws and others have simply been forgotten. In any given year, fewer than a dozen people might lay eyes on tens of thousands of miles of America’s grassland rivers. But, as environmental writer George Frazier shows, following their twists and turns is one of the best ways to experience the wild essence of the prairies.
Riverine Dreams invites us on a trip along eight grassland rivers—including the Missouri, the Niobrara, and Purgatoire—traversing their environmental and cultural histories and introducing us to the people who study, paddle, and conserve them. This journey takes Frazier across the North American interior—from Montana and Colorado to Nebraska and Missouri—where he uncovers a remarkable movement to celebrate and preserve these natural nothing less than a grassland river revival.
The first accessible introduction to these waters, Riverine Dreams is a personal exploration of the rivers that are so vital to the health of the prairies.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published October 3, 2025
About the author
George Frazier
2 books12 followersGeorge Frazier is an author of books about the environment and wild places. He lives in Kansas with his wife and daughter. His work has appeared in Wild Earth, National Parks Magazine, and many other magazines and journals.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 23, 2025
Highly recommended to all libraries and personal collections for all who care for our public lands, nature lovers, paddlers, armchair adventurers, and others with roots in the great plains!
If you're able to be in Lawrence, Kansas October 5, 2025 consider attending the author's talk.
George Frazier's Riverine Dreams
SUN | Oct 5 | 2:00–3:30 PM | Lawrence Arts Center Auditorium
Lawrence's own George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of Kansas, has a new book! Join us as he shares stories from Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America. Prepare for tales of strange riverine forests left over from the ice age, leviathan fish migrations, modern grizzlies roaming the plains, endangered plants as rare as mastodon ivory, an audacious plan to return 10,000 bison to a Great Plains biosphere reserve—and, of course, river otter mayhem. Lawrence Public Library is partnering with Friends of the Kaw, Great Blue Heron Outdoors, and Raven Book Store to offer this community event.
If you're able to be in Lawrence, Kansas October 5, 2025 consider attending the author's talk.
George Frazier's Riverine Dreams
SUN | Oct 5 | 2:00–3:30 PM | Lawrence Arts Center Auditorium
Lawrence's own George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of Kansas, has a new book! Join us as he shares stories from Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America. Prepare for tales of strange riverine forests left over from the ice age, leviathan fish migrations, modern grizzlies roaming the plains, endangered plants as rare as mastodon ivory, an audacious plan to return 10,000 bison to a Great Plains biosphere reserve—and, of course, river otter mayhem. Lawrence Public Library is partnering with Friends of the Kaw, Great Blue Heron Outdoors, and Raven Book Store to offer this community event.
June 14, 2025
This is a four star book for me. I was raised in Oklahoma so I have a fondness for the plains. This book made me want to go on a road trip to visit some of these wonderful, albeit neglected, places. If you like learning more about the natural world around us and how humans change it, you may enjoy this book. Despite the loss of much of the grassland river ecosystems, Frazier highlights pockets of progress and hope.
The book covers a lot of ground (and water) in exploring 8 different grassland rivers, such as the Missouri, the Kaw, and the South Platte. What you get in this book is the author's trips through segments of these rivers by kayak, the history of the river and how it has changed - and different attempts at recovering and rewilding the grasslands around them. Frazier talks about flora, fauna, soil and sand, water, kayaking, farming, ranching, climate change, unlikely coalitions, parks, and reserves. Lest this sound too dense, he has a colorful way of writing, sometimes whimsical or dramatic. He does not the follow the school of using plain words whenever you can!
Many thanks to Net Galley and the University of Chicago Press for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
The book covers a lot of ground (and water) in exploring 8 different grassland rivers, such as the Missouri, the Kaw, and the South Platte. What you get in this book is the author's trips through segments of these rivers by kayak, the history of the river and how it has changed - and different attempts at recovering and rewilding the grasslands around them. Frazier talks about flora, fauna, soil and sand, water, kayaking, farming, ranching, climate change, unlikely coalitions, parks, and reserves. Lest this sound too dense, he has a colorful way of writing, sometimes whimsical or dramatic. He does not the follow the school of using plain words whenever you can!
Many thanks to Net Galley and the University of Chicago Press for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
November 10, 2025
Chock full of information on prairie, plants, animals, fish, history on six grassland rivers in five states through the eyes of the author George Frazier (canoeing for the most part). Enjoy the style of the authors writing. Wouldn't say poetic, but certainly some great phrasing - two of my favorites. 1) " The Missouri river itself is a blockbuster, as is the Mississippi on the state's sunrise border." 2) "My phone was worthless in the sandhills backcountry, the wind the only network with a dependable five bars." Enjoyed learning about some of the people involved in the prairie restoration work as well as Appendix A that lists all the organizations and places mentioned in the book by chapter. Glad your daughter got to experience some of it with you and thank you for writing such a detailed and enchanting travel log.
November 25, 2025
If Kansas-based author George Frazier were ever to extend an invitation to join him on a canoe trip on a prairie river, consider the invitation carefully before assenting. Frazier’s canoe was literally blown away from atop a wooded bluff along the Grand River in northwest Missouri during an intense windstorm. The canoe was never seen again, and Frazier had to abandon his trip and hike out to a road. He replaced the ill-fated Grand River canoe with a thin-skinned Kevlar Wenonah canoe and set off with his wife to explore Nebraska’s Niobrara River, only to tear out the bottom of the new craft on streambed boulders. During a four-day, 340-mile race on the lower Missouri, the MR340, Frazier pulled his canoe ashore at midnight at a mandatory checkpoint. While stretching his stiff legs, the driver of a pickup truck parked near the landing suddenly and inexplicably gunned the truck’s engine, lurched over a curb, banged into a tree and a parked car, and barreled straight for Frazier, stopping just short of plowing him over.
Fortunately, not all of Frazier’s trips along America’s grassland rivers included such challenges, although paddlers on some rivers do have to be alert to hazards including barbed wire stretched from bank to bank; irate, gun-toting landowners who are not fond of canoers trespassing on private property; and wing dams and irrigation diversion structures that are not marked on maps.
Frazier had logged numberless miles paddling the Kaw (or Kansas) River in northeastern Kansas even before it had become a popular recreational river. But after witnessing the destruction of an original tallgrass remnant near Lawrence, Kansas, he was inspired to try to better understand and appreciate more fully the grasslands of the Kansas River valley. He came to realize that the rivers coursing through the grasslands had never been documented like many other American rivers, so set out to chronicle rivers whose stories had never been fully told. “Like William Least Heat-Moon, who search for the ‘real’ America by driving roads that appeared as blue lines on old highway maps” (Heat-Moon, W.L. 1982. Blue Highways. Fawcett Crest), Frazier set out to uncover the stories of the prairies and their rivers by canoe. He discovered a remarkable movement underway across the Midwest and the Great Plains at the intersection of grasslands and rivers—what he calls a grassland river revival.
Following months of research and conversations with local experts, he settled on eight clean, beautiful and relatively undisturbed sections of rivers that scored high marks for grassland quality, scenery, ecotourism and community engagement, biodiversity, and history: the Upper Missouri in Montana, the Grand in northern Missouri, the Kaw, the Purgatoire in southeastern Colorado, the South Platte in northeastern Colorado, the Niobrara in northern Nebraska, and the Lower Missouri in north-central Missouri.
Frazier makes distinctions between grassland rivers based on their sources. The Upper Missouri, South Platte and Purgatoire arise in the Rocky Mountains, then spill onto the arid High Plains. These rivers with seasonal hydrographs historically experienced peak flows in May and June during spring snowmelt, then steadily declined as the summer progressed. In some years, they dried into a series of intermittent pools in the riverbeds. However, with the construction of reservoirs and demands for irrigation water during the growing season, streamflow has evened out in these rivers so that they now experience somewhat dependable perennial flow. The prairie rivers, in contrast, are less variable. These rivers and their tributaries drain watersheds that receive more—and more evenly distributed—precipitation than those rivers further west in the rain shadow of the Rockies. In an extreme case, the Niobrara is fed by countless artesian springs gushing from the Ogallala Aquifer and from water percolating through the porous Nebraska Sandhills dunes.
Frazier devotes one chapter to each of the eight rivers or river sections. The chapters begin with a good map of the river reach under consideration, including important topographic and cultural features germane to the trip. Frazier then provides a general overview of the river reach. For each river, he concentrates on two or three ecological, natural or cultural features that render the river distinctive.
For example, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Missouri Department of Conservation have crafted a vision to save the core prairies along the Grand River and to restore tens of thousands of adjacent acres in a unique public-private partnership, the Grand River Grasslands, centered on TNC’s Dunn Ranch Preserve. The preserve provides habitat for the endangered greater prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido), and Frazier joins a small group to observe the birds’ distinctive mating ritual on a lek, or dancing ground. He also discusses the challenges of controlling the aggressive non-native legume Sericea lespedeza in prairie restorations and restoring populations of dwindling Topeka shiners (Notropis topeka) to small headwater streams. He then recounts his exploration on the middle Grand during which his canoe was swept away by a fierce derecho. The middle Grand also features prominently in the historic westward migration of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Frazier devotes considerable attention to an abandoned Mormon riverside settlement at Adam-ondi-Ahman. Each of the chapters contains just such a fascinating medley of travelogue, history, and environmental science.
Two chapters were particularly appealing, those profiling the Purgatoire and the Niobrara. The Purgatoire (pronounced Purgatory by locals) is unusual in this collection because low flow and difficulty obtaining access across private property prevented Frazier from canoeing. Instead, he completed a 12-mile round-trip hike to the river in the spectacular 16,000-acre Picketwire Canyon in the Commanche National Grassland, the fourth largest of America’s 20 national grasslands established following the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Picketwire (a corruption of the name Purgatoire to make it easier to pronounce for Americans) is the site of America’s largest dinosaur trackway consisting of more than 2,100 individuals footprints left by brontosaurs, allosaurs and camptosaurs along at least 130 separate pathways over an area the size of a football field. The dinosaur tracks are the highlight of the canyon, but Frazier also discusses the locally famous autumn Oklahoma brown tarantula (Aphonopelma hentzi) “migration” (actually, males ranging widely seeking mates), the persistence of native fish in the river, efforts to control non-native salt cedar (tamarisk; Tamarix spp.) and Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia) trees, and the Indigenous, Spanish and American colonial history of the region.
The chapter on the Niobrara is the standout in the book. The river so captivated and entranced Frazier that he waxes lyrical throughout. The Niobrara, a tributary of the Missouri, is among the most popular canoeing and floating rivers in the Midwest. A lower reach was designated a National Wild and Scenic River in 1991. The river links six distinct ecosystems, and dozens of species reach their eastern or western range limits here, sometimes hybridizing. Tributaries are sustained by cold water upwelling from the Ogallala Aquifer and the adjacent porous Nebraska Sandhills. Springs like Smith Falls, the highest waterfall in the state, create chilled microclimates that allow stranded remnants of Pleistocene plant communities to persist, especially on shaded north-facing slopes above the river and in steep ravines that do not receive much direct sunlight. Frazier also recounts his search for the endangered blowout (or Hayden’s) penstemon (Penstemon haydenii) on two long, solitary walks through the Sandhills 30 miles south of the river in the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge. If this depiction of a natural wonder does not inspire readers to pick up a paddle, I cannot imagine what would.
In addition to the individual river reach maps, the book contains a general map of America’s grasslands and their rivers. Frazier also includes a few black-and-white photographs in each chapter. The supplemental materials include endnotes keyed to each chapter, a selected bibliography, and an index.
Riverine Dreams incorporates enough science to engage serious professionals and naturalists, and enough travel adventure to interest general readers, all wrapped up in a well written and compelling account of exploration, discovery and hopefulness on America’s overlooked midsection waterways.
Fortunately, not all of Frazier’s trips along America’s grassland rivers included such challenges, although paddlers on some rivers do have to be alert to hazards including barbed wire stretched from bank to bank; irate, gun-toting landowners who are not fond of canoers trespassing on private property; and wing dams and irrigation diversion structures that are not marked on maps.
Frazier had logged numberless miles paddling the Kaw (or Kansas) River in northeastern Kansas even before it had become a popular recreational river. But after witnessing the destruction of an original tallgrass remnant near Lawrence, Kansas, he was inspired to try to better understand and appreciate more fully the grasslands of the Kansas River valley. He came to realize that the rivers coursing through the grasslands had never been documented like many other American rivers, so set out to chronicle rivers whose stories had never been fully told. “Like William Least Heat-Moon, who search for the ‘real’ America by driving roads that appeared as blue lines on old highway maps” (Heat-Moon, W.L. 1982. Blue Highways. Fawcett Crest), Frazier set out to uncover the stories of the prairies and their rivers by canoe. He discovered a remarkable movement underway across the Midwest and the Great Plains at the intersection of grasslands and rivers—what he calls a grassland river revival.
Following months of research and conversations with local experts, he settled on eight clean, beautiful and relatively undisturbed sections of rivers that scored high marks for grassland quality, scenery, ecotourism and community engagement, biodiversity, and history: the Upper Missouri in Montana, the Grand in northern Missouri, the Kaw, the Purgatoire in southeastern Colorado, the South Platte in northeastern Colorado, the Niobrara in northern Nebraska, and the Lower Missouri in north-central Missouri.
Frazier makes distinctions between grassland rivers based on their sources. The Upper Missouri, South Platte and Purgatoire arise in the Rocky Mountains, then spill onto the arid High Plains. These rivers with seasonal hydrographs historically experienced peak flows in May and June during spring snowmelt, then steadily declined as the summer progressed. In some years, they dried into a series of intermittent pools in the riverbeds. However, with the construction of reservoirs and demands for irrigation water during the growing season, streamflow has evened out in these rivers so that they now experience somewhat dependable perennial flow. The prairie rivers, in contrast, are less variable. These rivers and their tributaries drain watersheds that receive more—and more evenly distributed—precipitation than those rivers further west in the rain shadow of the Rockies. In an extreme case, the Niobrara is fed by countless artesian springs gushing from the Ogallala Aquifer and from water percolating through the porous Nebraska Sandhills dunes.
Frazier devotes one chapter to each of the eight rivers or river sections. The chapters begin with a good map of the river reach under consideration, including important topographic and cultural features germane to the trip. Frazier then provides a general overview of the river reach. For each river, he concentrates on two or three ecological, natural or cultural features that render the river distinctive.
For example, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Missouri Department of Conservation have crafted a vision to save the core prairies along the Grand River and to restore tens of thousands of adjacent acres in a unique public-private partnership, the Grand River Grasslands, centered on TNC’s Dunn Ranch Preserve. The preserve provides habitat for the endangered greater prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido), and Frazier joins a small group to observe the birds’ distinctive mating ritual on a lek, or dancing ground. He also discusses the challenges of controlling the aggressive non-native legume Sericea lespedeza in prairie restorations and restoring populations of dwindling Topeka shiners (Notropis topeka) to small headwater streams. He then recounts his exploration on the middle Grand during which his canoe was swept away by a fierce derecho. The middle Grand also features prominently in the historic westward migration of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Frazier devotes considerable attention to an abandoned Mormon riverside settlement at Adam-ondi-Ahman. Each of the chapters contains just such a fascinating medley of travelogue, history, and environmental science.
Two chapters were particularly appealing, those profiling the Purgatoire and the Niobrara. The Purgatoire (pronounced Purgatory by locals) is unusual in this collection because low flow and difficulty obtaining access across private property prevented Frazier from canoeing. Instead, he completed a 12-mile round-trip hike to the river in the spectacular 16,000-acre Picketwire Canyon in the Commanche National Grassland, the fourth largest of America’s 20 national grasslands established following the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Picketwire (a corruption of the name Purgatoire to make it easier to pronounce for Americans) is the site of America’s largest dinosaur trackway consisting of more than 2,100 individuals footprints left by brontosaurs, allosaurs and camptosaurs along at least 130 separate pathways over an area the size of a football field. The dinosaur tracks are the highlight of the canyon, but Frazier also discusses the locally famous autumn Oklahoma brown tarantula (Aphonopelma hentzi) “migration” (actually, males ranging widely seeking mates), the persistence of native fish in the river, efforts to control non-native salt cedar (tamarisk; Tamarix spp.) and Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia) trees, and the Indigenous, Spanish and American colonial history of the region.
The chapter on the Niobrara is the standout in the book. The river so captivated and entranced Frazier that he waxes lyrical throughout. The Niobrara, a tributary of the Missouri, is among the most popular canoeing and floating rivers in the Midwest. A lower reach was designated a National Wild and Scenic River in 1991. The river links six distinct ecosystems, and dozens of species reach their eastern or western range limits here, sometimes hybridizing. Tributaries are sustained by cold water upwelling from the Ogallala Aquifer and the adjacent porous Nebraska Sandhills. Springs like Smith Falls, the highest waterfall in the state, create chilled microclimates that allow stranded remnants of Pleistocene plant communities to persist, especially on shaded north-facing slopes above the river and in steep ravines that do not receive much direct sunlight. Frazier also recounts his search for the endangered blowout (or Hayden’s) penstemon (Penstemon haydenii) on two long, solitary walks through the Sandhills 30 miles south of the river in the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge. If this depiction of a natural wonder does not inspire readers to pick up a paddle, I cannot imagine what would.
In addition to the individual river reach maps, the book contains a general map of America’s grasslands and their rivers. Frazier also includes a few black-and-white photographs in each chapter. The supplemental materials include endnotes keyed to each chapter, a selected bibliography, and an index.
Riverine Dreams incorporates enough science to engage serious professionals and naturalists, and enough travel adventure to interest general readers, all wrapped up in a well written and compelling account of exploration, discovery and hopefulness on America’s overlooked midsection waterways.
October 17, 2025
After finishing George Frazier's The Last Wild Places of Kansas: Journeys into Hidden Landscapes, I had to venture out to my local indie bookstore and pick up a copy of Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America.
I wasn't disappointed. Riverine Dreams is Frazier's travelogue of visiting prairie rivers in the Great Plains to tell the stories of these river systems and their adjacent prairie ecosystems. As someone who enjoys paddling and adventuring in wild places, Frazier's stories inspire me to get out there, to learn, and more fully appreciate the wilderness.
I wasn't disappointed. Riverine Dreams is Frazier's travelogue of visiting prairie rivers in the Great Plains to tell the stories of these river systems and their adjacent prairie ecosystems. As someone who enjoys paddling and adventuring in wild places, Frazier's stories inspire me to get out there, to learn, and more fully appreciate the wilderness.
December 9, 2025
Excellently written and takes you into the captivating beauty of the grassland rivers of American prairies. The author does a wonderful job describing the ecological and historical importance of the grassland rivers, all the while you will be cheering him along on his journeys. There are many surprises along the way. I grew up in America’s heartland and this book has deepened my respect and understanding of the nature I never knew was in my backyard. Must read!!
December 10, 2025
Delicious reading! Perfect for winter if you are not a cold-water paddler and yearning to get out on the water again. It is a nice combination of ecology, botany, cultural history, and having an adventure on a river. Don't rush through but savor each river. Especially enjoyed the rivers I have paddled that are represented in the book as I got to relive my adventure in addition to sharing George's adventure.
June 13, 2026
I loved this book. Wish I had visited these places and written it myself! This would appeal to anyone interested in American natural history. It was even more so for me with my interests in ecological restoration and prairies in particular.
July 13, 2026
Delightful! I learned a lot about the Great Plains in which I live, and the rivers that nourish us. I appreciated the information on Prairie restoration, which provided hope for “good enough” restoration efforts by widely varying constituencies.
May 7, 2026
Read this book for the Fernwood Book Club. The author tells his journey riding a canoe down eight river rides on Midwest rivers.
Want to Read
May 27, 2026O
July 30, 2026
Frazier floats down a few prairie rivers, discusses environmental impacts of reintroducing grasslands, and interviews my ex girlfriend.
October 16, 2025
Fun-to-read account of the author's search for rivers that exemplify the changes in the landscape over the past few centuries. Good balance of the cultural and natural history, current state of the rivers, restoration efforts, and his experiences paddling them.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews