In 1950 Raven, at the age of 14, had collected a plant called "C. rubicunda". In the early 1950s, in the course of revising the genus "Clarkia" Harlan Lewis and his wife Margaret Lewis discovered the herbarium specimen collected by Raven. They visited him in 1952 when he was 16, and wanted to know where the collection was made. Lewis eventually located the new species, and in 1958 Lewis and Raven published a botanical description of this plant, called "C. franciscana", which was morphologically very closely related to "C. rubicunda" and "C. amoena".