How Jefferson Davis Brought America… Camels!
Why Feral Camels Once Haunted the American Southwest
Why Feral Camels Once Haunted the American Southwest
(Explorers Web) – During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, denizens of the Old West reported seeing a strange and mysterious beast: the camel. These sightings were not the fevered hallucinations of cowboys experiencing heatstroke, dehydration, whiskey, or tuberculosis. There really was a population of feral camels wandering the Sonoran Desert.
How did a bunch of camels end up loose in the desert? The U.S. Army, of course.
A quartermaster dreams of camels
The two visionaries met during the Mexican-American War. Henry Constantine Wayne was a Georgia native in his early thirties, a former West Point instructor decorated for his bravery in the battles of Contreras and Churubusco. The Pennsylvanian George Crosman was older, almost fifty, and saw little active combat. He was a logistics man with camel-related ambitions.
In 1836, Crosman had presented a proposal to the higher-ups in the War Department, advocating a U.S. Army Camel Corp. They were unreceptive. A decade later, however, Henry Wayne was listening. Wayne wrote his own report for the War Department, and this time it ended up on the desk of a fellow West Point alumnus: Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis. He was…
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