The Snyder East African expedition

The Snyder East African Expedition was sponsored and led by Harry Snyder, sportsman and patron of the AMNH. The staff included George Gilbert Goodwin, AMNH assistant curator of mammals, who also photographed the expedition; John A. Hunter, white hunter; and Colonel A. J. Macnab, President of the Camp Fire Club of America and a firearms expert. They went to collect mammals and to explore territory southwest of the Taita District in Kenya. Geographically, this film contains scenes of the Voi River, Mt. Kilimanjaro, Lake Jipel and surrounding swamplands, waterfalls, the Ngorongoro crater, and the plains and forests of these areas. There is some footage of the Masai tending their cattle, their dung-plastered dwellings, manyattas, ornaments, and dress. A girl wearing a long apronlike coin-decorated skirt, her torso and head wrapped in cloth, dances. Other natives are seen before their beehive dwellings. They wear ear plugs and tattooed lines down their faces, or cicatrices, and skirts of cloth shredded into strips. The predominant material in this film is of animals of the Serengeti National Park; most of it consists of long shots and is not particularly good. There is extensive footage of elephants: feeding, knocking down trees, a large bull being slaughtered, and Snyder posing with its enormous ivory tusks. The natives celebrate the hunt with a dance and carry Snyder around on their shoulders. Goodwin did not complete this expedition because Roy Chapman Andrews, then AMNH Director, sent him to northern Persia (now Iran) with AMNH patron Sydney Legendre to collect mammals.