In the early 1800s harsh desert landscapes in North America’s West, together with the Sonoran, Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Nice Basin deserts, have been thought of a serious impediment by early advocates of US westward growth. However when the Mexican-American Warfare led to 1848 the US acquired huge expanses of desert lands, together with the territories now outlined as Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and elements of neighbouring states. The 1853 Gadsden Buy added a closing sliver of desert territory to southern Arizona and New Mexico. America’s westward growth was now a narrative of desert growth.
Within the mid-1800s Indigenous communities such because the Apache and Yavapai have been nonetheless resisting the settler challenge of, first, the Spanish/Mexican colonisers, and, then, the European/American colonisers. In a couple of brief years, a as soon as summary query of how the US authorities might take management of desert lands shifted to a right away logistical problem. Establishing new US army outposts on this context was a frightening process resulting from restricted meals and water provides within the area, mixed with sparse or non-existent highway networks.
However some People thought that they had a solution to the US Military’s desert challenges: camels. The thought was first urged in an 1836 report back to the Warfare Division, written by Main George H. Crosman of the Quartermaster Corps, liable for coordinating army logistics. Later gaining desert expertise through the Mexican-American Warfare, Crosman believed camels might assist the military transfer folks, gear, and sources by the troublesome desert terrain: ‘For energy in carrying burdens, for affected person endurance of labor, and privation of meals, water & relaxation, and in some respects velocity additionally, the camel and dromedary (because the Arabian camel is named) are unmatched amongst animals.’
The camel concept slowly unfold amongst army leaders and advocates of US growth within the 1840s, together with the environmentalist George Perkins Marsh. Within the early 1850s Marsh encountered the camel as a US envoy within the Ottoman Empire, and noticed them used for each transport and in battle by native Arabs, Bedouins, and the French and British brokers within the area. In 1854, having returned to the US, Marsh delivered a speech on the Smithsonian Institute by which he extolled the camel’s twin virtues as a ‘beast of burden’ and an ‘animal of conflict’. The US Military, he argued, ought to benefit from the camel’s mixed strengths to bear heavy masses throughout lengthy distances, and to ‘strike terror’ among the many settlers’ Native American opponents.
Probably the most impactful advocate of camels was Jefferson Davis, who would later turn into the president of the Confederacy. Like Crosman, he had served within the Mexican-American Warfare, the place he gained firsthand expertise of army operations within the desert west. Davis was not considering Marsh’s imaginative and prescient of troops driving camels in battle, as an alternative seeing them as a great answer to the provision chain challenges of building army management of the newly acquired western territories.
As quickly as Davis turned secretary of conflict in 1853 he known as on Congress to acceptable funding for an experiment to verify his perception within the ‘benefits to be anticipated from using camels and dromedaries for army and different functions’. He secured this appropriation in 1855; Congress accredited $30,000 to construct a ‘Camel Corps’ by sending the USS Provide to the Center East and northern Africa to gather as much as 50 camels. The mission was led by Main Henry C. Wayne, an evangelist of the camel scheme for the reason that 1840s, and the particular person liable for first introducing the concept to Davis.
But Wayne had no understanding of camels, not to mention choose which breeds can be most suited to North America’s desert west. He due to this fact tried to get a various pattern, which have been divided within the ship’s register as ‘Arabian camels of burden’ or dromedaries with particular origins (together with Tunis, Muscat, Mt Sinai, amongst others), in addition to a handful of Bactrian camels. After a number of weeks, the USS Provide had 33 camels able to cross the Atlantic. In the long run, 34 arrived in Indianola, Texas in Might 1856: one died en route, however two calves have been born and survived the passage. After unloading, the USS Provide was ordered to repeat the mission, returning with one other 41 camels in February 1857.
For all of the urgency utilized to safe funding for the Camel Corps, the military didn’t instantly use the animals in army service. Slightly, they have been examined with a couple of brief treks in Texas and, in 1857, some have been assigned to an expedition to California. Led by the previous naval officer and frontiersman Edward Fitzgerald Beale, this was a check of the animals’ suitability for long-distance journeys. In Beale’s Congressional studies on the journey, he was effusive concerning the camels’ energy and endurance, elaborating: ‘At occasions I’ve thought it unattainable they might stand the check to which they’ve been put, however they appear to have risen equal to each trial, and to have come off of each exploration with as a lot energy as earlier than beginning.’ His studies known as for his or her wider adoption in army operations, however this enthusiasm was misplaced on authorities officers on the eve of the Civil Warfare. Shortly after the conflict started, the Camel Corps was dismantled resulting from an absence of curiosity inside the army ranks – although a couple of have been commandeered by Accomplice troops once they took Camp Verde, Texas, the challenge’s headquarters.
Beale’s pre-Civil Warfare tour to California had a extra lasting impression, nonetheless, in that the Camel Corps turned a preferred tradition sensation. Tons of of individuals turned out alongside the way in which to greet the camel caravan, and revelled within the unique spectacle. The San Francisco Night Bulletin wrote that the camel caravan’s arrival in 1858 gave the streets ‘fairly an Oriental side’, ‘citing bizarre and far-off associations to the Jap traveler, whether or not by ebook or in any other case of the land of the mosque, crescent or turban, of the pilgrim mufti and dervish with visions of the good shrines of the world, Mecca and Jerusalem’.
The media helped to color a brand new image of the desert west. Slightly than being a terrifying terrain stuffed with antagonistic Indigenous teams, the camel story forged the area as an area model of the Biblical ‘Outdated World’ deserts that have been intimately acquainted to the Christian American settlers. Because the US strengthened its maintain on these new desert lands, this Center Jap fantasy was likewise strengthened; American settlers persistently turned to it for classes in construct their new arid empire – starting from using vegetation and animals to applied sciences for water use and agriculture to grasp the desert. The American experiment with camel colonialism was short-lived, nevertheless it illustrates a longstanding sample of drawing inspiration from abroad empires, in addition to romanticising the army foundations of the settler state.
Natalie Koch is Professor of Geography and the Atmosphere at Syracuse College and writer of Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso, 2022).
