# Fierce Little Midgets

<blockquote>
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."
<p>
The committee gave Lieutenant Schufeldt two and a half years to 
complete his mission.
</blockquote>

<p>Erik Larson, "The Devil in the White City", p. 121.

<p>I am making progress, slowly.