Delia Akeley
Ran away from farm work at thirteen and ended up leading her own expeditions across Africa
Delia Denning grew up poor on a Wisconsin farm and left home in her early teens, eventually making her way to Chicago, where she met and married the naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley. Their work together for Chicago's Field Museum and later the American Museum of Natural History took them on two long expeditions to British East Africa, collecting animal specimens for museum displays at a time when that meant shooting the animals they came to document. Delia handled logistics, managed porters, and on at least one occasion shot a charging elephant to save her husband's life.
Their marriage ended in divorce, and rather than retreat from the work that had defined her, Akeley organised an expedition of her own in 1924, this time travelling into the Ituri forest of the Belgian Congo specifically to live among and document the Mbuti people, sometimes called pygmies in the racially charged language of her era, whose way of life she wrote about with more curiosity and respect than most Western visitors of the period managed, even as her writing still carried the assumptions of her time.
She published two books drawing on her expeditions, Jungle Portraits and J.T., Jr., about a pet monkey she raised, and remained an active traveller and lecturer well into old age, dying in 1970 at 101.