The camel in the US West.

I knew about the use of camels in the western US from my father.
In brief summary:

A U. S. Army explorer of the American West, Major George H. Crossman, recommended to Congress in 1836 that the Army should experiment with the use of camels since the chief desert problem for the traditional military animals was lack of water and forage. Camels could go longer without water than horses or mules.

One officer, Major Henry Wayne, was particularly enthusiastic about the concept. Wayne eventually made a formal recommendation to the War Department that the importation of camels be undertaken in order to test the feasibility of a camel cavalry.

Wayne’s idea reached Jefferson Davis, a U. S. Senator from Mississippi, who was then chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs and who later would become President of the Confederate States of America. Davis liked the idea. He was aware that the French had used camels with marked success in Egypt during the Napoleonic campaigns. Davis had commanded an army regiment during the Mexican War. He understood something about the problems of military and civilian communication and travel in arid regions.

Eventually, $30,000 was appropriated by Congress to purchase 50 camels and hire 10 camel drivers.

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The Great Southwestern
Desert Camel Experiment by Joe Zentner


But here are some of the things I learned today:

• Camels were American for millions of years before any member of the human family ever appeared in this hemisphere. The camel family evolved here and spread to the Eastern Hemisphere via a well-traveled land bridge from Alaska to Siberia a million years ago. One species of true camel persisted in California until 15,000 years ago, late into the Ice Ages, and the South American branch, which includes llamas, still flourishes today. Some of the latter are the only members of the family still persisting in the wild. All the Old World camels have long since submitted to domestication.
• It is as a pack animal that the camel truly excels. A strong mule can tote up to 300 pounds. A packhorse can carry somewhat less. But a dromedary easily hauls 600 pounds over a 30-mile distance in a day, while a Bactrian can carry up to 1,000 pounds. It is virtually impossible to overload a camel. When, in a camel's considered opinion, the load strapped to it is excessive; it simply will not rise. Neither cursing nor beatings will budge an overloaded camel.
• after a prolonged dry spell, it can take in as much as 25 gallons of water within a few minutes.
• Surprisingly, some 3,000,000 camels were employed in military capacities during World War I. And 50,000 camels were used in World War II despite the widespread motorization of cavalry forces.
  
• Soon it was discovered that six camels could do the work of 12 horses and in 42 hours less time, and that they climbed trails that wagons could not manage.
• In the late 1850s, camels were used to survey a route for a wagon road from Fort Defiance in Arizona to the Colorado River. The Santa Fe Railroad and U. S. Highway 66 subsequently followed this route.
• a company of Frenchmen in the Southwest obtained two of the camels. By 1870 the pair had increased to a herd of 25, all doing labor for their masters. The animals were kept on a Nevada ranch, near the Carson River, from which they carried salt and hay to the Comstock gold and silver mines. Sometime later, these camels were sent to Arizona where they hauled ore from the Silver King mine to Yuma. They were finally turned loose in the desert near Maricopa Wells.
• In 1885, a young boy of five whose father commanded the army garrison at Fort Selden, New Mexico, saw an extraordinary sight that he recollected much later in life. “One day a curious and frightening animal with a blobbish head, long and curving neck, and shambling legs, moseyed around the garrison . . . the animal was one of the old army camels.” The little boy would later become known to the world as General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
• In 1891, nine camels roaming on the western edge of Death Valley appeared, silhouetted against the sky, before the eyes of two gold miners who thought they were seeing ghosts. The miners, Shep Searcy and Charlie Fisher, reported their brief encounter to residents of a nearby town, people thought they were crazy.
• In October 1891, camels, suddenly appearing from the desert, caused a cattle stampede outside Harrisburg, Arizona. In the 1890s, passengers on Southern Pacific trains reported seeing gaunt camels pacing the sands of Arizona Territory. In 1901, in western Arizona, a Southern Pacific train ran over and killed one of the animals, a crew surveying the international boundary between Arizona and Mexico in 1901 reported sighting of a camel. An Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe crew told about seeing one near Wickenburg, Arizona in 1913. There are reports of camels stampeding horses near Banning, California, 25 miles west of Palm Springs, in 1929. A part-time prospector who, although, he himself had never seen one, assured that camels still roamed deep in Baja California’s rugged desert country in 1975.

Apparently there was a lot I didn't know about the camel in the west.

“The attempt to make use of camels in the Southwest might have succeeded under different conditions,” wrote the late Walter L. Fleming, dean of Vanderbilt University and an authority on the experiment in all of its ramifications. The operation lost its strongest advocate when Jefferson Davis left the War Department. The camels’ best friend, Major Wayne, who had both theoretical and practical knowledge of the animals, had joined the Confederate army in 1860. Also, rapid expansion of a rail network in the Southwest made transportation by beasts of burdens a picturesque but historical anachronism. Failure of the U. S. Camel Cavalry was more due to Americans’ attitude toward the animals than to any shortcoming on the camels’ part."

Now isn't that a hoot? The camel is originally from the North American continent, and the tumbleweed is from the Russian Urals.