The Mojave is a day's drive now. A modern truck crosses it with the air conditioning running, a cooler in the bed, and a gas station every hundred miles.
In the 1850s none of that existed, so the Army was trying to supply a chain of forts strung across a thousand miles of the new American Southwest. The wagon roads were bad or nonexistent, water sat a full day apart, and the mules hauling the freight died doing it. So the War Department tried something most of the country took for a joke. It bought camels.
The U.S. Army Camel Corps gets remembered, when it gets remembered at all, as a piece of frontier comedy: the time the government imported camels and then lost them in the desert. That version is true, but it leaves most of the story out. The experiment was a serious answer to a hard logistics problem, it worked better than almost anyone expected, and the Civil War killed it before the Army could commit. It also has a darker history than the comedy version admits, one a historian has traced straight into the slave trade.
The idea
The idea came from Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, years before he had the power to fund it. As a senator from Mississippi he introduced a camel measure in 1851 and again in 1852, and both times the committee laughed it out of the room, according to the Army Historical Foundation. What changed was Davis's job. When Franklin Pierce made him Secretary of War in 1853, the man with the strange idea suddenly ran the department that could test it. Davis would become president of the Confederacy eight years later, and that thread runs through the rest of this story.
On March 3, 1855, Congress put up thirty thousand dollars "for the purchase and importation of camels and dromedaries to be employed for military purposes." It sounded strange, but the logic was sound. A transcontinental railroad was still years of surveying and politics away, the Army had to move freight across desert that killed pack mules by the string, and a camel could carry several times a mule's load on little water. Davis sent Major Henry C. Wayne across the Atlantic aboard the Navy storeship USS Supply to buy the animals.
What a camel could do
Wayne came back with about seventy-five camels over two voyages, in 1856 and 1857, and the Army settled them at Camp Verde in the Texas hill country. They earned their keep right away. A camel could pack six to eight hundred pounds, roughly triple a mule's load, and work for days between water in country where a mule needed to drink every night. It ate creosote and scrub the horses wouldn't touch. It crossed sand and sharp rock that broke hooves.
The men hated them. The camels spooked the horses, they bit, they smelled, and learning to load one was its own miserable education. But they did the single thing the Army had bought them for. They moved freight across ground that defeated everything else, and they did it thirsty.
The road west
The real test was a road survey. In 1857 the Army sent Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale west to lay out a wagon route along the 35th parallel, from Fort Defiance toward the Colorado River, with a string of camels carrying the expedition's supplies. Beale left his horses behind on purpose. He wanted to know what the animals could do over a long haul, and by the end he was a convert, reporting that the camels outworked every mule he had and asked for almost nothing in return. The line he scouted would later carry a railroad, then Route 66, then Interstate 40. The first survey party down that corridor of the modern Southwest moved on camelback.
On August 23, 1857, Beale's caravan reached El Morro, a two-hundred-foot headland of pale sandstone in western New Mexico, and camped at the pool of shaded water at its base, the National Park Service records. Travelers had been stopping at that water for six centuries. Ancestral Puebloans lived on top of the rock and cut images into it. In 1605 the Spanish colonizer Juan de Oñate scratched his passage into the same stone, and by 1857 California-bound emigrants were carving their own names above the pool. The camels knelt in the dust below a cliff already crowded with the record of everyone who had come through.
The part that complicates it
The comedy version skips what the money and the interest around the camels touched. Michael E. Woods, a historian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, worked through the paper trail the experiment left behind and found the animals tangled up with the westward ambitions of the slaveholding South.
Woods is careful about the claim. Davis and Wayne, he wrote, "did not envision this scheme when they commenced the camel experiment." They wanted a working supply animal. But in 1858 Wayne published a letter suggesting enslaved laborers could handle the camels as easily as any teamster, and Southern planters read it and wanted the animals for their fields. A second, private importation had nothing to do with the Army at all. A trader named John A. Machado ran camels into Texas, and Woods found that the ship carrying eighty-nine of them into Galveston in 1858 was, by an eyewitness account, probably a slave ship that had already quietly put its human cargo ashore. The camels were the cover. "Camels offered the perfect cover for slaving operations," Woods wrote, a vessel outfitted to keep animals alive at sea looking no different from one outfitted to keep people alive in a hold.
None of this means Davis ran a smuggling ring. What the paper trail shows is that the animals drifted into a web of officials, planters, and traders who all had a stake in slavery's survival.
What became of them
Camels in Texas, by Tom Lovell
The war ended the experiment before anyone decided whether it had worked. When Texas seceded in 1861, Camp Verde and its camels passed into Confederate hands, and the animals spent the war as an afterthought while the men who might have championed them fought over the country the camels were meant to help settle.
Afterward the Army wanted nothing to do with them, auctioning thirty-seven of the California camels in February 1864 and forty-four more from Camp Verde in March 1866, selling animals that had cost a fortune to import for a few dollars a head, Smithsonian reported. Some went to circuses and mining camps. Others were simply turned loose, and for decades feral camels wandered the deserts of Texas, Arizona, and California, thinning out slowly, the last credible sightings drifting into the 1940s.
They left their mark the way disappearing things do, in stories. Arizona spent the 1880s trading rumors of the "Red Ghost," a feral camel blamed for trampling a woman to death in 1883 and said, in the retelling, to carry the bleached skeleton of a man lashed to its back. The Corps' lead driver, an Ottoman-born cameleer the soldiers called Hi Jolly because they could not manage Hadji Ali, stayed in the desert until he died in 1902. In 1935 Arizona built him a small stone pyramid at Quartzsite and set a copper camel on top. The animals were gone, and the country kept talking about them.
The record
Doug Baum has spent more than two decades walking camels back through the country the Corps crossed. He founded the Texas Camel Corps in the late 1990s, loads his animals the old way, and takes them out to monuments like El Morro to tell a story most people assume someone invented. On the weekend of September 12 and 13, 2026, he will do it again at El Morro, walking a string of camels past the cliff while rangers talk about desert supply lines in the years before the railroad.
The rock has not changed. The pool still holds water. The Spanish inscription is still there, and the Puebloan images, and the emigrant names above the pool. The camels left no mark of their own. They were animals, and their drivers were only passing through, running freight on a route that would outlast the experiment by a century and a half. But they came by here in the late summer of 1857, and the ground they crossed is the same ground a rig crosses now, with the air conditioning running and the water problem solved.
How we reported this
This article draws on the following sources, accessed July 2026:
- El Morro National Monument news release: the National Park Service announcement of the Sept. 12-13, 2026 commemoration and the Texas Camel Corps program.
- U.S. Department of the Interior / NPS, "El Morro National Monument Commemorates U.S. Camel Corps": the record of Beale's caravan reaching El Morro on Aug. 23, 1857.
- Michael E. Woods, "The Dark Underbelly of Jefferson Davis's Camels," Journal of the Civil War Era (2017): the source for the connection between the camel trade, Southern planters, and slave trafficking, including the Wayne letter and the Machado importation. All slavery-related claims here are Woods's historical argument, attributed to him.
- The Army Historical Foundation, "The U.S. Army's 'Camel Corps' Experiment": the timeline of Davis's advocacy, the 1855 appropriation, and Major Wayne's importation voyages.
- Smithsonian Magazine, "Whatever Happened to the Wild Camels of the American West?": the postwar auctions and the feral herds that survived into the 20th century.
- The "Red Ghost" folklore and the Hi Jolly monument: the 1883 Red Ghost legend, presented as folklore, and the Hi Jolly monument at Quartzsite.