Delia Akeley

Delia J. Akeley
Delia Akeley in 1915
Born	Delia Julia Denning (1869-12-05)December 5, 1869 Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, U.S.
Died	May 22, 1970(1970-05-22) (aged 100) Daytona Beach, Florida, U.S.
Nationality	American
Other names	Mickie Akeley
Occupation	Explorer; hunter

Delia Julia Akeley (1869 – 1970), commonly known by her nickname, Mickie, was an American explorer. She was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a daughter of Patrick and Margaret (née Hanberry) Denning, Irish immigrants.

Delia Julia Akeley was born in 1869, although over the years, whether due to Delia's own misrepresentation or that of others, her birth date has been given as 1875. Mickie ran away from home in her late teens and made her way to Milwaukee, where she married Arthur Reiss, a barber, in 1889.

She was just shy of her 20th birthday (because of the erroneous attribution of her birth date, virtually every published account states that she was 14 when she married Reiss). In Milwaukee she met taxidermist, artist and inventor Carl E. Akeley, who was employed at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Akeley biographers Penelope Bodry-Sanders and Jay Kirk suggest that Delia and Akeley had an affair; in any case, Delia and Reiss soon divorced, and in 1902 Delia married Akeley, who by then had become Taxidermist-in-Chief at the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, later the Field Museum of Natural History.

During his years at the Field, she assisted her husband in the creation of his groundbreaking Four Seasons of the Virginia Deer dioramas, and joined him on a 1906-07 collecting expedition to Africa. Akeley later joined the American Museum of Natural History in New York where he continued his taxidermy work and conceived the great Africa Hall. Delia accompanied Akeley on expeditions to collect specimens central to the most important displays in the African sections of both museums. The larger of the mounted African elephants known as the "Fighting Bulls" in the Field Museum's main hall was killed by Delia on the 1906 Field Museum expedition, and she also collected one of the members of the elephant group in the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History on a 1909-11 expedition for that museum.

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 Akeley was attacked by a bull elephant while out hunting with a team of his porters and helpers. They panicked and ran thinking he was done for. But Akeley survived, in no small part because Delia traveled back to his body with two porters who had initially fled in terror. He was seriously injured, but Delia got him to a hospital after a dangerous portage in mountainous country. She also nursed him back from the brink of death on at least one other occasion when he would have succumbed to blackwater fever²