Eliza Scidmore, the first female writer, photographer, and board member for National Geographic, has another accomplishment to her credit: She was the first person to publish a photograph of an elephant in the magazine, in December 1906.

An inveterate traveler who brought Japan’s famous cherry blossoms to the U.S. capital, Scidmore had photographed Asian elephants being rounded up in Siam (now Thailand) to serve as work animals for the king.

A year later, in 1907, the magazine published nighttime photos of African elephants near Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. The photographer, Carl Schillings, worked in the style of George Shiras, aka Grandfather Flash—the first person to use camera traps and flash photography to capture images of wildlife.

But it