And then what…?
The experimental use of imported camels by the Army was fairly short-lived. Interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War, the advocates of the camel operations went on to become the leadership of the Confederacy.
Even without this, the camels were not an unmitigated success. They spooked the horses and their feet didn’t do well in the rough decomposed granite of the American deserts. Regardless, the completion of the transcontinental railroad signaled the end of the western frontier.
So what happened to these creatures we moved across oceans and continents for our purposes? In the finest tradition of the west, fact soon slips into legend as the camel experiments with the Army floundered by late 1863.
There were two groups of camels when the Civil War began, one in California and one in Texas. The Texan camels were captured by the Confederacy in the course of the fighting, then retaken by Union forces at the end of the war.
Those in Texas were sold for pennies on the dollar into private hands in 1866, and many found their way into circuses in the southwest and Mexico. Credible written accounts and tall tales of ghost camels roaming the desert abound, and one might think that as photography became more common, somebody might have snapped a photo of these creatures as they strode through town, but no images from this era have yet been found.
The camels in California were passed around from one military corral to another, before being shipped to the Bay Area and sold at auction in Benicia in 1864… where the so-called camel barns still stand today. The story is similar to that of the Texan camels: some were supposedly sent to work the silver mines in Nevada, while others wound up in circuses or on private ranchos.
The trail goes cold. Or rather, becomes muddled with scores of other camels being imported to the states by enterprising businessmen who still believed they had a role to play in the booming American west.
SAID AND TOPSY
There are only leads about physical remains of two individual camels from the original herd. Not much to hold, perhaps, but like the single D’Heureuse photograph, monumentally more than nothing to lay a hand on.
A camel named Topsy is held at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Her rumored story is amazing, seemingly impossible to verify in large part, and at any rate is too much to cover here. Fantastic story aside, her provenance is unfortunately sketchy. Although a note from when she died in the 1930’s lists her age as 100 years old, that is more than double the usual camel lifespan. Perhaps a more likely explanation is that Topsy was the daughter of one of the original herd.
Above images from NHM LA
Longevity concerns aside, when topsy died in 1934 at the old Griffith Zoo in LA, her legend as “the last of the Camel Corp” was already a part of the public domain. True or not, her obituary ran in newspapers across California as the last survivor of the expeditions.
bottom left column: Last Army Camel Gives Up Ghost from Imperial Valley Press, 1934
The other skeleton with links to the camel corp is a camel named Said, who was supposedly killed near Fort Tejon at the base of the Grapevine on Edward Beale’s ranch. Beale, commander of the first expeditions, had purchased many of the camels when the Army auctioned them off and kept them on his land. The remains of Said were shipped across the continent to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, where they have been on display since the late 1800’s. Yours truly had the chance to visit Said in the hall of bones at the Smithsonian earlier this year, where the skeleton is presented with little fanfare and only a glancing mention of this history; one specimen amongst thousands. What an extraordinary, and also somehow rather melancholic, unsought journey of oceans and continents for this ship of the desert.
Said’s skull at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, 2025