In the history of American natural history museums, few stories carry more irony—or heartbreak—than the divergent paths of the Chicago Field Museum and the Milwaukee Public Museum, two Midwestern institutions born within a decade of each other and shaped, in their earliest days, by the same taxidermy genius: Carl Ethan Akeley. Akeley arrived in Milwaukee in 1886 as a young, ambitious taxidermist hired by the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), then barely a decade old. During his