Creator
Paul B. Du Chaillu
Title
Honoree Banquet
Coverage
Raton, New Mexico
Date
November 29, 1881
Description
Raton is located in the northeast corner of New Mexico. Established as a watering hole on the Santa Fe Trail, the town had become a depot on the line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in 1881 when its literary society hosted a game dinner for French zoologist and anthropologist Paul B. Du Chaillu, the first modern European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas and the Pygmy people of central Africa. Du Chaillu had recently published a book about the prehistory of Scandinavia titled The Land of the Midnight Sun (1881).