Martha Maxwell stood only 4 feet 11 inches tall. But in the annals of natural history, she was a giant of a kind.

After moving West during the gold rush, she became perhaps the first female naturalist to hunt, skin and stuff her own specimens, which she displayed in her own museum. She was perhaps also the first naturalist, period, to display animals in the kind of lifelike tableaus now familiar at institutions everywhere.

Not that Maxwell’s work wasn’t greeted with condescension, even disbelief. One stereographic image, taken at her museum, shows her standing quietly in the middle of a diorama, behind a pronghorn, with the caption “Mrs. Maxwell and Her Pets.”

And when she put her work on view at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where she represented Colorado, some visitors were so doubtful that she had done it all herself that a sign was added, reading simply “Woman’s Work.”