What happened to the wild camels in the American West?

In the 1880s, a feral menace haunts the Arizona territory. It was called the Red Ghost, and its legend grew as it roamed the highlands. In 1883 it trampled a woman to death. It is said to be 30 feet tall. At one point, a cowboy tried to rope the ghost, but the ghost turned and charged at his mount, nearly killing them both. One man chased it and then claimed it disappeared before his eyes. Another swore it had devoured a grizzly bear. From this story

Arizona: Stories from Old Arizona Buy Related Content The latest sign that a robot uprising is coming? Marshall Trimble, Arizona's official historian, told me that witnesses to the camel race said it was a devil-like animal strapped to the back of a monster. A few months after the first attack, a group of miners discovered the apparition along the Verde River. As Trimble explains in his book "Old Western Folktales," Arizona, they zeroed in on the creature. Something shook and fell to the ground as it fled from their gunfire. The miners approached the spot where it fell. They saw a human skull lying in the dirt, skin and hair still clinging to the bones.

A few years later, a rancher near Eagle Creek discovered a feral red camel grazing in his tomato fields. The man grabbed his rifle and shot the animal. The Ghost's reign of terror is over.

News of the news made its way back to the East Coast, where the New York Sun published a color story about Red Ghost's death: "When the rancher went out to examine the dead beast, he discovered several rawhide wounds , and was twisted on his back, shoulders, and even under his tail,” or someone, once whipped on a camel.

The legend of the Red Ghost is full of embellishments, the creepy flourishes and imaginative twists that any great campfire story needs. Look closer, though, past the legends—past the skulls, the hides, and the “eyewitness” accounts—and you’ll discover a bizarre chapter in American frontier history. In the late 19th century, wild camels did roam the West. How they got there and where they came from is a story almost as strange as the novel itself.

*****

In 1855, under the direction of then-Secretary of State Jefferson Davis, Congress appropriated $30,000 for "the purchase and importation of goods for military purposes." Camels and llamas" were key to the country's westward expansion; a transcontinental railroad was still decades away, and he believed the animals were ideal for transporting supplies between remote military outposts. By 1857, after two successful tours of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the U.S. Army purchased and imported 75 camels. However, within ten years, every camel will be auctioned.

The camels were stationed at Camp Wilder in central Texas, where the army used them as pack animals for the short trip to San Antonio. In June 1857, on orders from Washington, the herd was divided: more than twenty were sent to California, led by Edward Fitzgerald Beale. Five months later, Bill and his party arrived at Fort Tejon, a military outpost located a few miles north of Los Angeles. In 1930, A.A. Gray, writing for the California Historical Society Quarterly, noted the significance of the trip: “[Bill] drove his camels more than 1,200 miles in the heat of summer through a barren country where food and water were scarce. , high in the mountains, in the most dangerous places where roads had to be built... He discovered what his closest companions said could not be done

Back in the east, the army herded the remaining cattle. Working at Camp Verde and several outposts in Texas, small pack trains were deployed to El Paso and Fort Bowie in 1860, according to a 1929 report by W.S. Lewis. Sent to the Mexican border to find undiscovered routes, Congress had ignored three proposals to buy additional bonds; the political costs seemed too high. The mule lobby didn't want to see more imported. camels, for obvious reasons," Trimble said. They lobbied hard in Washington against camel experiments.

If the mule lobby did not stop the camel experiments, the Civil War would be over. At the beginning of the war, after Texas seceded from the Union, Confederate troops captured Camp Wilder and its camels. "The popular science report in 1909 said: "They were left to graze, and some became homeless. "Three of them were captured by Union forces in Arkansas and auctioned off in Iowa in 1863. Others found their way into Mexico. Several were used by Confederate post offices," a camel was reportedly pushed by Confederate soldiers. Go down the cliff. Another, nicknamed Old Douglas, became the property of the 43rd Mississippi Infantry Regiment and was reportedly shot during the siege of Vicksburg and then buried nearby.

By the end of 1863, during the Civil War, the camel experiment was essentially complete. California Camel, who moved to Los Angeles from Fort Tejon, has been without a job for more than a year. In September, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered the animals to be auctioned off.

In February 1864, a frontier entrepreneur named Samuel McLaughlin purchased the entire herd and shipped several camels to Nevada to carry salt and mining supplies in Virginia City. (McLaughlin organized a camel race in Sacramento to raise funds for the trip. A thousand people reportedly showed up to watch the spectacle.) According to Gray's account, the animals that remained in California were sold to zoos , circuses, and was even sold back to Buehler himself: "Over the years Buehler might have been seen working on his ranch and happily traveling with his camels, and the Texas herd was auctioned off shortly after in 1866 to a lawyer named Ethel Coopwood, who for three years had been transporting supplies by camel between Laredo, Texas, and Mexico City. The trails started to get cold.

Coopwood and McLaughlin sold their herds: to the zoo, to the border traders, and so on. ), a former zookeeper and owner of the Texas Camel Corps, wondered where they went from there. As it turns out, the answer isn't so clear when the military brought the camels to Texas. Hundreds more camels were imported to Galveston and San Francisco in anticipation of a boom in the western market.

"Those commercial camels began to mingle with the former army camels in the 1870s," "The mixed herds make it increasingly difficult to track the descendants of the military camels," Baum said. "Unfortunately, their final destinations and ultimate fate are obscured by those traveling to zoos and circuses." It’s all vague, which is not to say that the fate of every camel is unknown.” We know what happened to at least one: a white-haired camel named Said. He was Bill's most prized mounted camel on his western expeditions, and at Fort Tejon he was killed by a group of younger, larger camels. A soldier, who was also a veterinarian, arranged for Syed's body to be transported to Washington, where it could be preserved by the Smithsonian Institution. The camel's bones are still in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History.

Are there any others? Many were used in Nevada mining towns, the most unfortunate were sold to butchers and meat markets, and some were driven to Arizona to help build a transcontinental railroad. However, when that railway opened, it quickly disappeared from the camel freight market in the Southwest. Owners who did not sell their herds to traveling entertainers or zoos reportedly let them out in the desert—eventually, the story returned to the story of the Red Ghost.

Wild camels do survive in the desert, although there are almost certainly not enough of them living in the wild to support a reproductive population.

Sight