"In the 1850s, with few trails blazed in lands recently wrested from Mexico, the men explorers entrusted to guide them had, more often than not, gained their position through bluster and bravado, rather than actual knowledge.
Lieutenant Edward F. Beale and his party discovered this to be true when his intrepid guide led them to the edge of Arizona’s Canyon Diablo, a chasm at least 100 feet deep with sheer walls that cost the company a 30-mile detour to get to the other side.
As Beale and his crew struggled to get equipment, supplies and food across a raging torrent surging down what had been, a few hours before, a dry wash, they also had to deal with a basic conundrum faced by explorers of that time: the absolute lack of forage and water for their animals in the Southwest. This scarcity meant they had allocated more than half of their draft animals and wagons simply to haul food and water for those self-same animals.
For the military, travel in the Southwest boiled down to one big problem. Not marauding Indians. Not worthless guides. But finding or transporting enough food to keep the animals alive, at a cost that would not bankrupt the U.S. government, a serious concern for government auditors.
One man, Gwinn Harris Heap, became a forceful advocate of camels as a cheap and effective means of transportation. Heap pontificated to anyone who would listen that camels reputedly carried twice as big a load as an Army mule, which, at best could be expected to haul 300 pounds, and that they did so at a greater speed than mules could manage. More important, he claimed, camels could eat just about anything and could go for days without water.
Few listened to Heap. But one person who did heed his claim was Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who would later become the president of the Confederacy. Davis asked Congress to fund an experimental herd of camels. He found an ally in Maj. Henry Wayne, of the Quartermaster Corps, who hoped the camels might mitigate the horrendous costs the Quartermaster Corps was suffering in keeping Army units in the field in the newly acquired Southwest. In 1855, Congress, having finally decided the use of camels wasn’t some kind of bizarre joke, appropriated $30,000 to be expended under the direction of the War Department for the purchase and importation of camels and dromedaries employed for military purposes.
Appropriating money for the experiment was only the beginning. Heap, Wayne and Lt. David Dixon Porter were given the task of procuring the camels. They purchased the beasts from wily traders and then transported across the Atlantic in the dead of winter on Porter’s sailing vessel, the Supply. Thirty-three camels set out on the voyage. One died in transit, but, amazingly, six calves were born; the two survivors put the total at 34.
Getting the camels to the United States was only half the battle. The camels responded to voice commands, provided they were given in Arabic or other Middle Eastern languages. English was not a part of their vocabulary. To make up for this deficit, the men hired two Arabs and three Turks to tend the camels for a year. At the end of the year, they were promised their passage home.
The camels and camel tenders disembarked on the coast of Texas on May 14, 1856, and made their way to Camp Verde. Early on, Secretary of War Davis reported a contest between a mule-driven wagon train and the unencumbered camels; they set out for supplies in San Antonio, 60 miles away. Six camels returned, carrying a total of 3,648 pounds, equal to two wagons drawn by six mules apiece. They made the trip in two days and six hours, whereas the wagons had taken four days and 30 minutes. Davis concluded his report by observing that the good ship Supply was bringing back 40 more camels.
To bring Beale to that moment when he and his camels ran afoul of Arizona’s Canyon Diablo in September 1857, the lieutenant first had to resign his commission in the Navy and bid successfully on a road-building contract to link Fort Defiance on the present-day Navajo reservation to the California border near the location of Needles. In July 1857, Beale set out with his camels from El Paso, Texas, to begin his extraordinary journey. Accounts differ as to whether Beale had advocated the use of camels or felt coerced into using them as part of the military’s experiment. In either instance, he came to appreciate the ability of the camels to expeditiously handle loads beyond the capacity of mules. Traces of Beale’s camel road still exist in northern Arizona; the route became the basis for the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad (later the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe) and for Route 66.
In the early days of the new year in 1858, Beale and about 14 camels “stalked into town last Friday week and gave our streets quite an Oriental aspect,” news accounts from Los Angeles reported on January 21, 1858. “It looks oddly enough to see, outside of a menagerie, a herd of huge, ungainly, awkward, but docile animals move about in our midst with people riding them like horses….”
The news report continued, “They [the camels] were found capable of packing one thousand pounds weight apiece and of travelling with their load from thirty to forty miles a day, all the while finding their own feed over an almost barren country. Their drivers say that they will get fat where a jackass would starve to death.”
If the War Department and Beale thought the camels were the answer to their transportation prayers in the Southwest, others held quite a different view. Muleskinners hated the beasts, claiming, with considerable justice, that horses and mules were terrified of the camels. Yes, answered a proponent of camels, but Indians also were terrified of them, which lessened the fear that Indians would raid to steal camels like they did to steal horses and mules.
One unimpressed Army officer noted that camels would indeed eat anything, including, he charged, the wood wagons he needed for transport. Naysayers also disputed the claim that camels could go anywhere, charging that a camel’s feet were cut and injured on the rocky soil and lava flows that covered much of the Southwest.
In the end, what doomed the great camel experiment was not the suitability of the camels themselves as beasts of burden, but the much greater cloud of doom that gathered over the United States of America in the late 1850s. The North and South had essentially gone in separate directions. As the 1850s drew to a close, Army officers increasingly saw an allegiance to their states instead of the nation as a whole.
Davis, John B. Floyd, his successor at the War Department, and Wayne, all supporters of the camel experiment, were Southerners. With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, all three made their way south to serve the new Confederacy.
Beale and others continued to think of camels as the solution to the transportation problems of the Southwest, but as the clouds of war gathered over the land, fewer and fewer people had any interest in pursuing the usefulness of camels. Most of the military camels based at Fort Verde fell into the hands of the Confederates when Texas seceded from the Union. A little more than a year after the outbreak of war, New Mexico Territory was in the hands of the Union, which did not have much use for Confederate camels.
Camels did prove useful in certain circumstances. When the government needed to survey the boundary between California and Nevada in 1861, surveyors had to travel through the heart of Death Valley. Camels proved of real assistance in that effort. But increasingly, camels became outcasts, turned loose to survive on their own.
Muleskinners never got over their hatred of the beasts. As a result, the state of Nevada passed a law in 1875 that prohibited camels on public highways. In time, the railroad became the solution to the transportation problems of the Southwest. Camels were occasionally seen in traveling circuses or alone in the vast land they had once been thought to conquer. One, with a clear U.S. Government brand, was seen on the midway of a San Antonio circus as late as 1903.
As for the camel drivers, when their year of service had expired, many returned home to their native lands. Others, hoping perhaps that life in the U.S. would be freer and more rewarding, chose to stay. Little is known of their fate. One ended up symbolizing the camel era. At a stone pyramid topped by a small metal camel silhouette, erected in 1935 in Quartzite, Arizona, an inscription states, “The Last Camp of Hi Jolly.”
Hi Jolly was Hadji Ali, a camel driver whose name had been corrupted to Hi Jolly by men who couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce his real name. Ali died in poverty in Quartzite in 1902.
Today, few would guess camels were once seen as a solution to transporting goods and people across the arid lands of the Southwest. If the Civil War hadn’t intervened, our picture of the Wild West might have been considerably different. Can we really imagine John Wayne racing across Monument Valley astride a camel? Would the 20-mule team borax cleaner have sold as well if it had been called 20-camel caravan borax? Maybe these beasts weren’t meant to lift our burdens. Yet we can relish in the idea of a great Southwest that was almost Camel Country.
- GERALD C. HAMMON, AUGUST 6, 2013"
Source:
TrueWest - History of the American frontier website