Flirting with Death
in the Sahara Desert

The story of Alonzo Pond’18
and the Franco-American Logan-Saharan Expedition

By Shannon Luckey'92

Before airplanes were the preferred form of crossing the watery divide between continents, before Beloit College became a launch pad for international programs, when the closest most students came to a semester abroad was a stint on the battlefields of Europe, there was Alonzo Pond’18.

Alonzo Pond'18 led expeditions to Algeria on behalf of the Logan Museum of Anthropology and lectured across the United States at colleges and universities about his work.

He is in Africa, drenched in firelight on a dark night in 1925, surrounded by natives, lost in the ceaseless rhythm of their drumming, his voice rising to fever pitch as the natives chant along with him, “Old McDonald had a farm, E, I, E, I, O.”

He also taught them the Beloit College yell that night.

It was a moment of comic relief during an incredible adventure that could well have left Pond and his fellow travelers like the ancient skeleton they later unearthed.

The danger lay not so much in the unforgiving desert landscape with its temperature swings and deceptive features, nor in the imposing peoples who carved life out of the austere Saharan plains and sometimes out of each other. No, the danger flowed like a river of arrogance and incompetence whose source was the expedition leaders themselves. Their inexcusable oversights often left the group without water, food, or gasoline.

Yet despite the bungling and personality clashes, the trip catapulted the Logan Museum of Anthropology and Beloit into the national spotlight and secured the College’s reputation in anthropology these eight decades since.

“It’s a huge story,” says William Green, present-day director of the Logan. “It was one of the museum’s and the College’s main endeavors in the ’20s and ’30s and gave Beloit an international reputation in anthropology.”

Logan Museum of Anthropology

Alonzo Pond, mounted on a camel in the Sahara in 1925. Later that year, he would lead the first expedition ever to explore the Sahara in automobiles.

It was the Franco-American Logan-Saharan Expedition, the first pneumatic-tired automobile crossing of the Sahara desert, which yielded artifacts that captivated the popular imagination in Pond’s day and still whisper ancient secrets to those who care to listen for them.

The trip was full of surprises for Pond. Perhaps the biggest was arriving in Algeria in the fall of 1925 to find that his modest trip on camelback had morphed into a motorized expedition fueled by big money and complete with a New York Times reporter, motion picture photographer, and the difficult Count Byron Kuhn de Prorok.

Perhaps he wondered how in the world he had landed in the middle of this mess. But then again, it was’t the first time Pond faced interruptions in his life plans. It took him six years to graduate from Beloit, no thanks to World War I.

He went from puttering around in the collections of the Logan museum and writing articles for The Round Table to driving an ambulance in the American Field Service in France. His time in the service taught him discipline and resourcefulness in the face of hardship and also gave him the motivation he needed to redeem a faltering academic career after he returned from the war.

Beloit College Archives

This photograph, taken during a 1930 Logan expedition to North Africa, shows Alonzo Pond (second row, second from right) his wife, Dorothy, (to his right) and their young daughter, Chomingwen.

Pond subsequently did so well academically that then-Logan Museum Director George Collie recommended him for a scholarship to the American School in Europe for Prehistoric Scholarship and later recruited him to buy artifacts in Europe for Beloit’s emerging department of anthropology.

On one of these buying trips, Pond ran into Maurice Reygasse, a French government official with a penchant for archaeology. Long story short: Reygasse smoothed the way for Pond to get a coveted permit to conduct archaeological work in Algeria. Pond returned to the States and secured funds from Beloit to underwrite the trip, and it was a done deal. Or so he thought when he left in the summer of 1925.

Sometime during the week or so he spent crossing the ocean, waves of change were washing over his carefully planned expedition just as surely as the violent swells of the Atlantic were crashing against the ship that carried him closer to an adventure he never could have imagined. Another explorer was vying for his place in history.

“In the 1920s, archaeologists really focused heavily on North Africa and France to try to understand the origins of modern humanity,” says Green. “People didn’t know at the time where the human species had evolved.”

Count Byron Khun de Prorok, an ambitious and flamboyant American travel lecturer who traded in archaeological artifacts, was planning his own trip, similar to Pond’s.

Beloit College Archives

"Camp Logan," during an expedition in Algeria, circa 1930. The small banner flying beneath the U.S. and French flags is a Beloit College pennant.

When French and Algerian officials denied him a permit, he struck a deal with Reygasse. De Prorok offered his camping gear, significant resources, and the use of three specially outfitted vehicles if he could share the permit. Reygasse brought the proposition to Collie, who agreed that Pond and de Prorok could share the permit for six weeks.

Pond was often at odds with de Prorok and Reygasse, but enjoyed the company of Times reporter Hal Denny and Beloit College Trustee W. Bradley Tyrrell’06, who had tagged along as a representative of the Logan.

Tyrrell was a rugged man like Pond, and accustomed to wilderness camping. Others in the group were too fond of creature comforts and couldn’t improvise solutions. But Pond maintained good humor despite the challenges presented by the desert and his fellow travelers.

“The photographer and the Paris mechanics had a really rough time. They just couldn’t take it and never did adjust to life in the open,” Pond wrote.“The rest of us found the trip more a picnic than a hardship. We saw new scenery. We met strange people and learned their customs. We met problems of travel and solved them, which gave us deep satisfaction and personal pride.”

Many problems were created by de Prorok, who was more interested in creating a sensational—and profitable—lecture series than in making scientific discoveries. He couldn’t be bothered with contingencies like ensuring proper rations of food, water, or petrol. That chafed Pond, the careful scientist.

Five decades later, Pond became so irritated with deProrok and his exaggerations that he was moved to write his own account as an antidote to the sensationalism deProrok had hawked over the years. The result: Veiled Men, Red Tents, and Black Mountains: The Lost Tomb of Queen Tin Hinan was published (posthumously) by Narrative Press in 2003.

This early 20th century coiled basket, in the collection of the Logan Museum of Anthropology, is one of the objects Alonzo Pond’18 brought back from Algeria.

Although less dramatic than de Prorok’s version of events, Veiled Men is no boring read. Pond captures the hilarious in the everyday and inspires empathy for anyone who ever had a really bad day that lasted for weeks. His writing is simple and conversational, honed by frequent telling and retelling and guided by the detailed diary he kept.

“Someone once described him as a poet with a scientist’s training,” says his daughter, Chomingwen Pond’50. “He was rigorous in his science.” Pond was also meticulous in recording myriad details of the desert voyage, like the challenges of finding water in the Sahara.

“Once we stopped at a well where nomads were hauling water. It was hauled up a hundred feet in goatskin bag. Each of us had to sample the desert beverage. It was cool. It was wet. It tasted much as the goat smells.”

Pond also had to master the art of camel riding, which apparently involves clutching the skin on the camel’s neck between one’s big toe and the one next to it. “In the months that followed, I learned to strengthen the muscles of my toes so that I could hang onto a camel almost as well as any circus monkey.”

Pond seemed to prefer camels to cars, and he certainly preferred them to the Paris chauffeurs who drove the cars, or more often than not, got stuck in the sand.

“When the two city men saw some gazelles dash away from near the stalled car they took off on foot with rifles. They fired several shots, but their judgment of distance in shooting was no better than their judgment of desert road conditions. The gazelles were perfectly safe.”

Pond wrote six books and countless articles about the Sahara Desert and his adventures in archaeology around the world, including an expedition in the Gobi desert with fellow famed Beloiter Roy Chapman Andrews’06.

Pond finished Veiled Men in the 1970s and tried without success to get it published until his death in 1986. So this rich personal narrative, which Pond wrote 50 years after his historic trek, might never have been published except for a brief encounter between a curious Beloit student and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Bob Salzer.

During his senior year, Michael Tarabulski’81 was writing a paper about images of native peoples in film for one of Salzer’s anthropology classes. Tarabulski remembers Salzer making an offhand comment to him one fall day in 1980: “Well, you know we have some old film in the basement here, and the man who made it is still alive and lives in Minocqua (Wis.)...,” Salzer told him.

The comment was the start of a productive friendship with Alonzo Pond.

“It sounded fascinating to me,” says Tarabulski, now the archivist for the University of Idaho’s international jazz collections. “So I looked at [the film footage] and began looking at photographs and, by and by, contacted Alonzo Pond.”

Tarabulski didn’t know it then, but that meeting in Minocqua in 1982 would spark a two-decades-long project chronicling the life and work of Pond.

Tarabulski had already begun making arrangements to take the film of the desert odyssey to the Smithsonian. He would later shoot a short documentary on Pond and spend a year at the State Historical Society in Madison sifting through, sorting, and saving Pond’s work for posterity. Then, in 2001, Tarabulski found an avenue to publish Pond’s book on the expedition.

A few years before, de Prorok’s book, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, had inspired Bill Urschel to start Narrative Press, Tarabulski explains. “He read it and liked it and wondered why it and other de Prorok books—and other books like those—were not in print,” he says. “In my search for deProrok things in 2001, I found news of the Narrative Press on the Web and contacted Urschel.”

Tarabulski then worked with Pond’s daughter, Chomingwen, to bring the manuscript to print.

William Green thought the book was a perfect fit for his newly created Beloit Anthropology Authors Program, whose mission is to highlight Beloit alumni who have written important books in the field. Green invited Tarabulski and Chomingwen Pond to campus last fall to talk about their work.

“It’s a window to a vanishing world,” says Tarabulski. “I’m very pleased to have rescued this bit of history from the basement of the museum for the sake of Alonzo Pond, who wanted to complete this project and was unable to, and for the College, my alma mater, which I love.”

Tarabulski continues researching and writing about Pond and de Prorok and has written introductions for the Narrative Press, which just published Digging for Lost African Gods and Mysterious Sahara, both accounts of de Prorok’s fantastic desert exploits that were formerly out of print.

photo by Jim Lyga

Michael Tarabulski’81 (left) brought the story of Pond’s 1925 expedition to the public with the help of Pond’s daughter, Chomingwen Pond’50. William Green, (right) director of the Logan, invited the two to participate in the Beloit Anthropology Authors Program last fall.

Of course, de Prorok neglects to mention in his books the wake of unpaid bills and broken promises he left behind him. He seems unconcerned that he had poisoned the political landscape for archaeologists who would follow, including Pond. But Pond’s style allowed him to overcome these hurdles.

“Pond’s notion when he was traveling was ‘We are the visitors here, and we try to be good guests and good visitors and learn from these people.’ That was an attitude that was really emerging in anthropology at the time. And in that, he was head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries,” says Tarabulski.

While discoveries that Pond and his compatriots made in finding the tomb of Queen Tin Hinan, legendary mother of the Tuareg people, are of debatable scientific significance today, the effect they had on the Logan Museum and the future of anthropology at Beloit is undeniable.

The trip laid the groundwork for other important archaeological expeditions in Algeria during the ’20s and ’30s and continues to spark the imagination of students in this generation.

“I think it shows that not only did staff and students make discoveries 70 years ago, but also that staff and students today can make similar discoveries,” says Green. “Useful discoveries can be done both in the field and in the museum; you really need to do both to make progress.”

"On the Trail of Roy Chapman Andrews'06" Beloit College Magazine, Spring 2001

Beloit College Archives home page

EMAIL:

Susan Kasten - Editor, Beloit College Magazine