The U.S. Camel Corps: America’s Forgotten Experiment
In the mid-19th century, the U.S. Army imported camels from the Middle East to patrol the deserts of the American Southwest, an experiment that faded into obscurity.
During the 1850s, as the United States pushed its boundaries westward, the vast and arid landscapes of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California posed unique challenges for transportation and military logistics. Horses and mules, the standard beasts of burden, frequently suffered in the sweltering heat and struggled across the sprawling, waterless expanses. It was Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War (and later President of the Confederacy), who championed a curious solution: the importation and deployment of camels.
The idea first surfaced during earlier U.S. expeditions, but in 1855 Congress actually allocated $30,000—a substantial sum at the time—for the “purchase and importation of camels for military purposes.” The official leader of the project, Major Henry C. Wayne, set out with U.S. Navy Lieutenant David Dixon Porter to the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions to buy camels. Over the course of a year, they negotiated with traders and diplomats in Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere, ultimately acquiring dozens of dromedaries and Bactrian camels, as well as handlers skilled in their care.
The ship USS Supply carried thirty-three camels across the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, arriving at Indianola, Texas in May 1856. The animals—dubbed “ships of the desert”—were led inland to Camp Verde, where they instantly became an object of curiosity and skepticism among soldiers and settlers alike. Despite this, the camels quickly proved themselves remarkably suited to the harsh desert. They hauled heavy loads, went without water for days, and crossed terrain that would cripple horses and mules. Reports described camels carrying up to 600 pounds, moving efficiently across the sun-baked landscape.
Army officers, including the notable Edward Fitzgerald Beale, led extensive surveys with their newfound partners. Beale’s Wagon Road—a new route from Fort Defiance, Arizona, to Los Angeles, California—famously relied on the camel corps for its most treacherous segments. Accounts from these expeditions marveled at the camels’ endurance and versatility.
However, the experiment was never widely embraced. Many soldiers found the animals temperamental, stubborn, and difficult to manage; their guttural noises and unusual odors distressed the horses, causing frequent commotion in the stables. Additionally, most handlers brought over from the Middle East, called camel drivers, spoke little English and were often isolated from the rest of the unit. The army’s bureaucracy and traditionalism also pushed back against the unfamiliar animals.
The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 largely doomed the Camel Corps. The Army splintered its units, and Camp Verde fell under Confederate control. Camels wandered off or were sold at public auctions, generally at a loss. A few made their way into traveling circuses and mining outfits, while others, released into the wild, gave rise to scattered stories of feral camels seen decades later in the deserts of the Southwest.
After the war, the United States never revisited the idea of camels as military assets. By the early 20th century, the only reminders of the episode were cryptic place names—Camelback Mountain in Arizona among them—and secondhand stories handed down by old-timers. Today, with the tale almost entirely absent from school curriculums and general knowledge, the Camel Corps experiment remains one of the most unusual and forgotten chapters in American history, symbolizing both the United States’ willingness to experiment and its resistance to change in the face of the unfamiliar.
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