South American Adventurer, Eleanor Widener
While Eleanor Widener set up her son’s memorial as a lasting legacy at Harvard, she wasn’t done with her world adventures. In 1915, she married surgeon and Harvard professor Alexander Hamilton Rice Jr. Rice had a passion for adventure, an interest Eleanor shared. She was the first Caucasian woman known to greet indigenous people of the Rio Negro region in South America. The people greeted her warmly, and Eleanor made friends with them.
A later trip to the Amazon region, however, didn’t end as well. The people of the deep Amazon attacked the exploration party. Two locals were killed in the conflict. While they abandoned that expedition, Eleanor and her husband continued to explore South America. Eleanor died of an embolism while shopping in Paris on July 13, 1937.
