Time was so short, the Executive Committee [of Chicago's World's Fair of 1893] began planning exhibits and appointing world's fair commissioners to secure them. In February the committee voted to dispatch a young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schufeldt, to Zanzibar to begin a journey to locate a tribe of Pygmies only recently revealed to exist by explorer Henry Stanley, and to bring to the fair "a family of twelve of fourteen of the fierce little midgets."The committee gave Lieutenant Schufeldt two and a half years to complete his mission.
Erik Larson, "The Devil in the White City", p. 121.
I am making progress, slowly.