Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The Civil War featured many dazzling innovations: ironclads, hot-air balloons, the Gatling gun. But if armored warships and more powerful guns pointed to the future of warfare, another innovation, hailed at the time as a forerunner of combat to come, certainly did not: the United States Army’s Camel Corps.
In 1836 an army officer from Georgia, George Crosman, first touted the idea of importing camels to America. The animals were perfect for making the long, grueling treks then being mapped out across the country. Still, not much came of the idea until about 15 years later when, thanks to some publicists like the well-known diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, the “Camel Transportation Company” was formed to operate a camel express between Texas and California and down to Panama, later to be called the “Dromedary Line.” It wasn’t alone: there was also an American Camel Company.
Both companies soon failed, but the idea had taken hold. Among its adherents was Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. A native of Mississippi, Davis was interested in the integration and development of the Southwest, perhaps with an eye toward expanding the Southern economy — and the slave system it relied on — toward the Pacific. But he and others struggled to find ways to overcome what in pre-railroad days was called the “tyranny of distance.” Davis’s belief that camels could be the solution was affirmed by a retired naval officer named Edward Beale, who had become something of a zealot on the subject of camels after reading about them in the French missionary Évariste R. Huc’s “Recollections of a journey through Tartary, Thibet and China, during the years 1844, 1845 and 1846,” a famous account of travels around Central Asia. In 1855 Davis had a ship outfitted and sent to North Africa and the Levant to purchase several camels “for army transportation and for other military purposes.”
Overseeing the project for Davis was Maj. Henry Wayne, another camel advocate, who argued that the animals could have direct military uses in “speedy communication,” and even as cavalry. He speculated that “Americans will be able to manage camels not only as well, but better than Arabs, as they will do it with more humanity and with far greater intelligence.” Moreover, he added, the project would be “a legacy to posterity, of precisely the same character as the introduction of the horse and other domestic animals by the early settlers of America.”
Joining Wayne on the voyage were his young son and Lt. David Porter, a naval officer and relative of Beale. Porter was also the brother-in-law of another camel enthusiast, the explorer and illustrator Gwinn Harris Heap, whose own father had been the American consul in Tunis. Together they formed a small but vocal American camel lobby.
The men sailed to Europe, where they stopped along the way to ask advice from experienced camel owners, including the grand duke of Tuscany, who had several on his estate. They also met zoological experts and scientists in England and France, some of whom discouraged them, partly on environmental grounds but also on financial ones, as the Crimean War had driven up the price of camels. But they proceeded onward after leaving Wayne’s son behind in a French school, where he remained for three years before seeing his father again.
They traveled on to Tunis, Malta, Smyrna, Constantinople and Alexandria. They returned to Texas with about three dozen animals, including several Arabian (dromedary) and Bactrian camels, a “Tunis camel” and a Tulu, which was a mix of Bactrian and Arabian. A second trip, in 1856, resulted in another four dozen, as well as some camel handlers, Wayne’s prediction about Americans’ facility with the animals having proved too optimistic. (Among the handlers were two men who would become well-known figures around postwar Arizona and California: the Syrian Hadji Ali, a colorful, moderately successful businessman better known to Americans as “Hi Jolly”; and George Caralambo, a similarly colorful rancher who was renowned as “Greek George.”)
The romance of camel-borne transportation took hold of the government’s imagination in the late 1850s. Beale imported more dromedaries to California in 1857, and in 1860 some three dozen Bactrian camels were brought from Mongolia by a German entrepreneur, Otto Esche, also to California. Davis’s successor, the Virginian John Floyd, was even more of a camel enthusiast, and he ordered a thousand camels to be bought and outfitted.
The camels began to prove their worth as pack animals. These “ships of the desert” could carry upwards of 300 pounds and could travel up to four miles an hour with few stops (certainly fewer than horses). They carried salt, dry goods and even the mail between Tucson and Los Angeles. Not only did they appear to be more economical than horses or mules, but also more self-sufficient: they ate Texas mountain cedar and creosote bush, plentiful plants that other pack animals wouldn’t go near.
Camels also had disadvantages. They were known, with justification, for terrible tempers. Horses were prone to panic around them — a fact that the camel lobby tried to spin, arguing that marauding Indians would be less likely to attack their caravans as a result. But this did little to persuade soldiers, who wanted little to do with them. This included the man in command of Texas and therefore of most of the camels, Gen. David Twiggs. Twiggs’ views were clear: “I prefer mules for packing.”
On Feb. 28, 1861, Confederate forces took over Camp Verde, Tex., where many of the camels were based. With the lines to the Pacific suddenly cut and the impending war clouds concentrated in the East, nobody knew what to do with the animals. Commanders used them to give rides to local children. Some camels in Arkansas were taken by Federal troops, who sent them on to Iowa and then proposed that they be auctioned. Elsewhere Confederate soldiers pushed a camel off a cliff because they thought it was a nuisance. “They were like a wart on a stick. We had them and couldn’t get rid of them,” said one.
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Beale did not give up. He wrote to the new Union secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, about devising new roles for the camels, but Stanton never replied. Eventually some were sold to the Ringling Brothers Circus. Others were made into jerky. Many were simply allowed to wander. In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad put an end to the “tyranny of distance” — and the need for camels.
A few of the camel handlers stayed on. Greek George changed his name to George Allen, got married and lived in what is now Hollywood. There were many rumors about his fate — that he had been killed by Apaches, or that he had committed suicide to avoid capture for a murder. In fact he died peacefully at Mission Viejo in 1913, at the age of 84.
Hi Jolly became a citizen around 1880 and became known as Philip Tedro. Like Greek George, he spoke better Spanish than English. He married in Tucson and had two daughters, Amelia and Herminia, and lived until 1902. Three decades later the state of Arizona built a monument to him: a stone pyramid with a camel on top.
As for the camels, there were sightings of their descendants throughout the Southwest until the middle of the 20th century.
Despite their exotic nature, the camels did prove useful and, even with the coming of the railroads, might have served a supporting role in the settlement of the American West. So why did the Camel Corps fail? Part of it was due to the inability of the lobbyists, who saw the camels’ advantages in theory, to convince soldiers to overlook the many disadvantages that they saw in fact. But other innovations were successfully forced on military men. The camels, however, had the added misfortune of having Jefferson Davis as their lead advocate.
Still, why didn’t the South make more use of the camels? Davis surely had other things on his mind during the war, and his commanders evidently failed to share his enthusiasm for the project. More decisive may have been the fact that so much of the war took place east of the Mississippi. The camels languished in the West.
We are left to wonder. What if the war had been fought differently? Would the camels have made a fine American cavalry? Would they have one day become as ubiquitous a symbol of the Wild West as the horse and cowboy?
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Sources: C.F. Eckhardt, “Charley Eckhardt’s Texas,” Texas Escapes, June 1, 2007; Odie B. Faulk, “The U.S. Camel Corps: An Army Experiment”; Harlan D. Fowler, “Camels to California” and “Three Caravans to Yuma: The Untold Story of Bactrian Camels in Western America.”
Kenneth Weisbrode is a writer and historian. His latest book is “The Atlantic Century.”