This week in Odd History, Congress appropriated $30,000 for the creation of the US Camel Corps. The camels were to be used in the American Southwest, where the arid conditions and harsh terrain made the use of horses impractical. Although the Camel Corps had some successes, it was abandoned when the Civil War broke out in 1861.
The Camel Corps had been suggested several years earlier by George H. Crosman, an Army lieutenant, and George Perkins Marsh, an early environmentalist who realized that camels would be well-suited to the desert environments of Texas, California, Nevada and Arizona. Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War (and later the President of the Confederacy) had worked with Marsh at the Smithsonian in 1848, and had met Henry C. Wayne, an Army Major who was friends with Crosman. Davis was intrigued by the idea of a Camel Corps, and in 1853, he presented it to Congress, saying that “[f]or military purposes, and for reconnaissances, it is believed the dromedary would supply a want now seriously felt in our service.” Congress was not prepared to listen, although it, and the press, debated the idea. In 1855, though, Marsh gave a lecture on camels at the Smithsonian, which tipped the balance in the Camel Corps’ favor. The government gave Major Wayne $30,000 and charged him with finding camels for the US Army.
Wayne set sail on the ship Supply, bound for Tunisia. He knew almost nothing about camels. His first purchase was a camel too ill to work. But slowly, he learned. He discovered the tricks unscrupulous camel traders used to make sick animals appear healthy, and discovered that the Arabian camels, which have one hump and are native to the Middle East, are best for riding, while the two-humped Bactrian, or Asian, camel is best for carrying loads. Even after he learned to identify healthy camels, though, he had difficulty finding them. The Crimean War was raging, and camels were needed to carry loads for the war. He tried Greece, Malta and Turkey, before finding his camels in Egypt. Under Egyptian law, Egyptian camels couldn’t be removed from the country, but after paying a number of bribes, Wayne succeeded in purchasing 33 camels and hiring five drovers to care for them. Two months later, he arrived in Texas with 34 seasick camels – one more than he started out with.
The camels quickly recovered from the voyage, and astonished locals with their strength and stamina, while frightening dogs and horses with their strong odor and strange appearance, and annoying soldiers with their unpleasant dispositions. They were not put to any real use until 1857, when Colonel Edward Fitzgerald Beale took over the command. Beale took 25 camels, 44 soldiers, two camel drovers and a number of horses and mules out on a survey expedition. The camels performed brilliantly.
Beale wrote, “The harder the test [the camels] are put to, the more fully they seem to justify all that can be said of them. They pack water for days under a hot sun and never get a drop; they pack heavy burdens of corn and oats for months and never get a grain; and on the bitter greasewood and other worthless shrubs, not only subsist, but keep fat. I look forward to the day when every mail route across the continent will be conducted and worked altogether with this economical and noble brute.” The expedition made it from El Paso, Texas to Los Angeles, California, then up the Grapevine to Fort Tejon, and back again. In 1858, Jefferson Davis’s successor, Secretary of War John Floyd, claimed that “The entire adaptation of camels to military operations on the Plains may now be taken as demonstrated.”
Floyd was wrong. When the Civil War broke out, Congress forgot about the Camel Corps. Most of the remaining camels were auctioned off in 1863. Others wandered into the desert to be shot by prospectors. Some were captured by the Confederacy, which used them to haul cotton into Mexico. Beale kept a small herd that roamed freely on his ranch when he wasn’t using them to carry supplies to Fort Tejon.
A few more were purchased by Hadji Ali, whom the Americans called Hi Jolly. Ali was one of Major Wayne’s original drovers. He ran a freight business with his camels, hauling goods from the Colorado River to the mining camps to the east. When the business failed, Ali sadly released the camels into the desert. He eventually married a Tuscon woman, and moved with her and their two children to Quartzsite, Arizona. There, he mined with a burro, which must have been as irksome to him as his camels had been to the soldiers in Texas.
According to one historian, “The final, sad act of the drama occurred on Dec. 16, 1903 when 75-year-old Hi Jolly was sitting in a saloon… A prospector stumbled in, telling of a huge, red camel wandering nearby. Jolly rushed outside and was never seen alive again. According to local legend, his withered body was found weeks later in the remote desert. There he lay with lifeless arms wrapped around the neck of the last camel in the West.” According to another account, Ali died in 1902 at age 73 and was buried in the Quartzsite Cemetery. Either way, his grave is marked by a massive monument commemorating his life in the US Camel Corps.
The tragic, but probably apocryphal, tale of Ali’s death in the desert is not the only legend to have sprung up around the story of the Camel Corps. In 1883, a woman’s trampled body was discovered near a thorn bush festooned with clumps of wiry red fur. The hoofprints in the mud around her were twice the size of a horse’s hooves. A few days later, some large animal crashed through a miners’ tent, again leaving behind enormous hoofprints and strands of red fur. The sightings continued for the next decade. Witnesses eventually realized that the creature, which had come to be known as “The Red Ghost,” was a camel, but the story grew stranger when a rancher reported that the beast had a rider. The next time it appeared, to a group of prospectors, they saw something fall from its back. When they retrieved the object, it turned out to be a human skull. In 1893, a farmer in Arizona saw the Ghost grazing in his vegetable patch and shot it. The rider was gone, but the straps which had held it on were still in place. No one has ever solved the mystery of who the rider was, or how he came to die upon the back of one of the last living members of the original Camel Corps.
In the spirit of the Camel Corps, a member of the 1st Cavalry Division is mounted on a camel for a parade during Operation Desert Storm. Image courtesy of the United States Army.
Featured image by ANGELOUX.
Sources:
E.F. Beale and the Beasts of Tejon (Archived)
The Red Ghost (Archived)
U.S. Camel Corps Remembered in Quartzsite, Arizona
This is crazy! Good job.
Always been one of my fav features!