Luella Agnes Owen

Luella Agnes Owen (8 September 1852 – 31 May 1932) was a speleologist and geologist, noted for her early studies on caves in Missouri.

Early life and education

Luella Agnes Owen was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on 8 September 1852. Her father, James Alfred Owen, was a lawyer. Her mother, Agnes Jeanette Owen (née Cargill), was the child of a wealthy businessman. She was the second of five children (Mary, Luella, Florence, Herbert, and Juliette) who survived to adulthood. Her older sister, Mary Alicia Owen, was a folklorist; her younger sister, Juliette Amelia Owen, was an ornithologist and botanist.

Luella attended a local private school before the Civil War. The Owen family were known Southern sympathizers. The Owen daughters were educated at home during the war years. Their mother was described as possessing "an eager mind and a retentive memory which gave her a solid base for the reading that throughout her life kept her well informed." After the war, Luella attended St. Joseph High School and graduated as the class valedictorian in 1872. She did not attend college, but studied geology on her own.

As a child, Owen showed early interest in the shells, fossils, and caves around St. Joseph, which became the subject of her later research. She was described as "brainy, brusque, and brave," like her father.

Caves

Owen met Iker Galache, a Presbyterian minister from Kansas City, in 1873 and together they went spelunking around the caves near the newly completed Missouri River bridge at St. Joseph. Later she studied glacial deposits in northern Minnesota and explored caves around southern Missouri, the Black Hills, and Yellowstone. While she sometimes faced difficulties visiting caves, in part because she was a woman, her fearless attitude encouraged men "cavers" to take her along with them. She had several mentors who were geologists, including James Todd, George Frederick Wright, and Newton Horace Winchell, that encouraged her to publish her research in foreign and American journals.