15 Facts About Delia Akeley

Delia Julia "Mickie" Akeley was an American explorer.

Delia Akeley was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a daughter of Irish immigrants, Patrick and Margaret Denning.

Delia Julia Akeley was born in 1869, although over the years, whether due to Delia's own misrepresentation or that of others, her birth year has been given as 1875.

Delia Akeley ran away from home in her late teens and made her way to Milwaukee, where she married Arthur Reiss, a barber, in 1889.

Delia Akeley was just shy of her 20th birthday, but because of the erroneous attribution of her birth date, virtually every published account states that she was 14 when she married Reiss.

In Kenya, when hunting the elephants that were to form the most important of all the displays in the African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, Carl Delia Akeley was attacked by a bull elephant while out hunting with a team of his porters and helpers.

Delia Akeley was seriously injured, but Delia got him to a hospital after a dangerous portage in mountainous country.

Delia Akeley nursed him back from the brink of death on at least one other occasion when he would have succumbed to blackwater fever.

Back in New York, Carl Delia Akeley spent his time raising money for the museum, sculpting models for his dioramas, and becoming better acquainted with Mary Lenore Jobe, a former debutante and Bryn Mawr graduate who had become an African explorer and ethnographer.

In 1924, after her divorce, Delia Akeley continued to travel widely in Africa leading her own expeditions and concentrating more on the ethnography of the more reclusive tribes such as the Forest People pygmies.

Delia Akeley was one of the first westerners to explore the desert between Kenya and Ethiopia, and she explored the Tana River in a dugout canoe, entering it from the Indian Ocean.

Delia Akeley lived for several months with the pygmies of the Ituri Forest, Zaire.

Delia Akeley was listed in the 1946 edition of Who's Who in America.

Delia Akeley was one of the first authors to write a non-anthropomorphic but psychologically insightful biography of another primate:.

Delia Akeley is included as a subject in a book on women explorers:.