This Day in American History

March 3, 1855—In one of the most visionary or oddest (take your pick) actions in its history, Congress appropriated $30,000 at the request of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to purchase and import Egyptian camels for military use in the deserts of the Southwest.

One thought went through my mind as I pondered why Congress might not “walk a mile for a camel” (as the old TV cigarette commercial put it) but would pay a heckuva lot for a batch of these. How did Davis get monetary approval for this, at a time when a) the South was disinclined to fund even internal improvement projects, and b) like now, Congress was better at creating projects than appropriating money to keep them going? (Take a look at Yellowstone National Park, which Congress created in 1872 without bothering to fork up the necessary maintenance funds.)

Given the ultimate fate of the sides they chose in the Civil War, most Americans today would be surprised to learn that in 1861, many ancestors thought more highly of the executive abilities of newly elected Confederate President Jefferson Davis than of the North’s Abraham Lincoln.

It wasn’t only that Davis had become a leading Senator while Lincoln had served only one largely unnoticed term in the House of Representatives, or even that Davis’ military glory in the Mexican War contrasted starkly with Lincoln’s almost comic-opera service in the Black Hawk War of 1832.

Like his predecessor as the South’s spokesman for states’ rights, John C. Calhoun, Davis really left his mark as one of the ablest Secretaries of War in this country’s history—something admitted by even some of his worst enemies. (One of whom was Senate colleague Sam Houston, who termed Davis "as ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.”) All of this occurred, of course, before the faults as politician and administrator that helped doom his leadership of the Confederacy came to the fore, including lack of flexibility, inability to work with others, and, of course, a rather large moral blindspot in regard to slavery.

Halfway through his term as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce, Davis had come a long way toward his goal of modernizing the Army. On March 2, he had gotten Congress to create two regiments each for the infantry and cavalry, reorganizing the latter as a separate army branch. (Many of the officers he installed in this crack new unit went on to gain renown for the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Joseph E. and Albert S. Johnston, and John Bell Hood.)

A supporter of a railroad stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific, Davis hoped to build the new route through the South. In reports to President Pierce concerning explorations and surveys in 1853 and 1854, he took notice of the use of camels in the Mideast, and, believing they could also be effectively used to open up commerce in the vast Southwest desert, suggested that a small number be purchased for use here. Congress adopted his suggestion

With no camels in the U.S., Davis had to bring them from abroad. This required sending a combined army-navy force to the Eastern Mediterranean on two separate trips to buy a total of 77 bactrian (two-hump) and dromedary (one-hump) camels; enlisting the help of six Arabs and a Turk to help pick them; transporting the 70-plus beasts of burden back to Indianola, Texas a year later; and having a short, cheerful camel-driver named Hadji-Ali (nicknamed “Hi Jolly” by the Americans) teach his art to Western mule-skinners.

In 1857, Edward F. Beale used 25 of these camels to help survey a wagon road from Fort Defiance in New Mexico to eastern California. His subsequent report praised their abilities as pack animals (they could haul 600 pounds for 30 miles in desert conditions), with one significant caveat: they smelled so badly and were so mean that neither horses nor men wanted to get near them.

Davis’ successor at the War Department, John B. Floyd, was encouraged enough by the experiment to request Congress for a thousand of them. By this time, though, sectional tensions were so high that Congress wanted no more part of it, and the Camel Corps came to an abrupt end.

The “Camel Corps” -- and with it, an early American encounter with the mostly unknown Middle East -- ended, largely unnoticed, in 1866. By that time, the remaining camels were shipped to Benicia Arsenal in California, where they were auctioned to the public. Some were used to haul freight to Nevada mining camps while others were turned loose in the Southwest desert, where they popped up from time to time to scare the crap out of unwary travelers.

Today, the Benicia Historical Museum at the Camel Barns commemorates this most unusual period in American military history.