Random Thoughts

In the 1850s a prominent official in the U.S. government had a brilliant idea. And, like many ideas dreamed up by governmental officials, this one did not work out as planned.

Mississippi politician Jefferson Davis, who would become the president of the Confederate States of America in a few years, was serving as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce in 1855 when he had the aforementioned thought.

Davis decided that U.S. Army troops stationed in the American Southwest would be able to carry out their duties better if they had camels to haul supplies across the deserts of that recently acquired arid region of the United States.

And so, after receiving Congressional approval, the army purchased and imported 75 camels from the Middle East. The new beasts of burden were forthwith dispatched to various southwestern military posts.

Farmers who had mules to sell to the army for beast-of-burden purposes were not happy! They lobbied vigorously for the government to end its camel experiment. Subsequently, Congress refused to appropriate more money for dromedary purchases.

Before long, of course, the Civil War disrupted the country like no other event in American history ever has. The army had a war to fight and very little time to worry about adjusting to using exotic animals for military purposes.

Moreover, several camels stationed in Texas were confiscated by Confederate sympathizers when the war began. President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, ordered the remaining animals to be sold at auction.

Some of the camels were consequently purchased by businessmen who used them to haul freight for their various entrepreneurial enterprises. Others were sold to zoos, circuses, and individual ranchers. A few of the beasts wound up living in the wild, owned by nobody.

The result, of course, was that the small herd was no longer performing military work and, for that matter, was no longer a herd.

Eventually, of course, all of the camels that had been imported by the U.S. government died – as did the idea of using them to perform military functions.