In 1853, Jefferson Davis—Senator from Mississippi and future President of the Confederate States of America—was appointed United States Secretary of War. The next year, he secured an appropriation from Congress of nearly a million dollars in today’s currency to purchase camels for experimental military transportation in the desert southwest during a time of Manifest Destiny that entailed violent conquest of Indigenous people while establishing trade and migration routes for resource extraction, farming and industry by incomers. Equipping a ship for the task, the Army acquired ungulates in Tunisia, Malta, Greece, Turkey and Egypt, about eighty camels in all over two trips, along with a handful of camel drivers (including a legendary character nicknamed Hi Jolly, buried and memorialized in Quartzsite, AZ). The U.S. Camel Corp, based at Camp Verde fairly near the heart of Texas, was born.
Robert E. Lee, while still a U.S. Army Officer in charge of the Department of Texas, first saw the camels in 1857. He ordered a long-range reconnaissance across the desert in scorching July, and the camels performed admirably all things considered. And most amazingly in the story of our telling, when these Arabian camels were brought to the desert, they readily began eating with elan, with verve, with relish, the creosote no critters currently living in its environment really want to eat.
Edward Beale, the leader of the expedition, wrote in his journal:
July 5. This morning we found at our camp, for the first time, a shrub, of which we are to see a great deal between this and the end of our journey, and in many places shall find no other wood. It is known as greasewood [creosote], and I was delighted to see the camels eagerly seek it, and eat it with the greatest apparent relish. It is certainly very gratifying to find these animals eating, by their own preference, the coarse and bitter herbs, hitherto of no value, which abound always in the most sterile and desolate parts of every road, so far as discovered, which traverses the broad extent of wilderness between the eastern States and our Pacific possessions.
It is speculated by scientists that these imported camels re-established a biological relationship between plant and animal broken when their North American camel ancestors became extinct just twelve thousand years ago, a blink in evolutionary terms. As explained in The Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow, this marks an evolutionary anachronism: attributes of a species best explained through coevolution with other species that have since become extinct. Absent the camels and other megafauna that might have eaten it, plus a changing climate, tough old creosote made its move and established itself as a monoculture across much of the desert.
In a world just two years away from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Beale, Lee and the rest didn’t dream that they had in fact united a plant and animal with millions of years of history. They had no reference point of camels originating in North America, though their bones are spread across the continent. Also, they were pre-occupied with their own aims, their interest in the camels and the landscape through which they travelled intensely transactional. What a cautionary tale about the value of field science, observation, and the work of putting our human egos aside to see the intertwinings of the world around us.
* Note on mental dissonance
Pause here a moment and let this bizarre historical chicanery sink in. Maybe close your eyes for a second. Consider the implications for the arid American west in recognizing that this scheme was put forward by the future architects of the Civil War.
The intersection of desert ecology, evolutionary biology, zoology and botany with the goals of Empire, systemic racism, greed and entitlement makes a bitter stew. Yet it’s important to sit with our revulsion long enough to separate the bitter from the sweet. The camels and the creosote, and the landscape that grew and sustained them, are entirely the heroes of this story. Regrettably, angrily, sorrowfully, it is the human behavior that marks the ugly portions of this picture.
1863 photograph by Rudolph D’Heureuse taken at the Drum Barracks in southern California
But are there pictures…?!
Upon learning of these remarkable, unwitting camels brought across oceans and continents in the 19th century, naturally I went looking for pictures of them.
Amazingly, there is only one verified photograph of any of the original camels from before, during or after their time with the Army. It’s this image above made in southern California by Rudolph D’Heuruese on his way to an 1863 trip into the Mojave. An obscure photographer today, the 44 images D’Heuruese made of the Mojave are currently the earliest known images of this desert, reflecting the complex human and environmental interactions encapsulated in this story.
It’s easy to miss, but that dark smudge to the right of the horse is a one-humped species of camel. It’s perhaps frustrating that this only picture of the camels is not more clear or enlarged. And yet, this scrap of photographic evidence, no matter how dark the silhouette, is also monumentally more than having no images at all; an interesting meditation on the power of photography.
Creosote makes a cameo in this botanically-focussed image by D’Heureuse. Note the long arms of the creosote with tips of foliage behind the barrel cactus in the center of the frame. Image
But after all of this… what happened to the camels? Ahh, stay tuned for part 3 of the story!