The Hells Canyon Complex was controversial before even being built, ever since the Idaho public scrutinized the Idaho Power Company’s request to license three dams on the Snake River in 1947. During the New Deal era, public power—a method of energy administration defined in which communities owned infrastructure under local government—was the norm for hydroelectricity; while Idaho Power wanted to privately run three dams, advocates for public power in the region instead contended against Idaho Power in favor of establishing a single, high dam. After a long battle, private power won when the Federal Power Commission issued Idaho Power a license in 1955, allowing them to build a private hydroelectric complex, in turn signaling a decline of public power’s favor nationwide. Due to the Hells Canyon dam construction in the deepest gorge on the North American continent, the construction process proved difficult, and builders had to dig a twenty-three-mile access road into the Idaho side of the canyon. Along with the road, contractors set up offices, facilities, housing, and a mess hall for construction workers. In a matter of six months, the Hells Canyon Dam’s construction was complete in 1967, and it began generating electricity shortly after. The political controversy in the postwar years about whether hydropower was something to be publicly or privately owned has roots deep in the ecological. The Hells Canyon Complex sits on the Snake River Basin, a desert ecosystem, while many of the models that public ownership advocates used were based on dams built on the Columbia River Basin, which was forested and mountainous. Because of the ecological differences inherent to these basins, people interacted differently with these water systems, and as a result, their priorities varied in what services a dam should provide. In the Columbia Basin, priority was given to energy production, while in the Snake Basin, priority was given to irrigation. This is largely due to the relationship people had with the land. In the Snake Basin, people cultivated the land for crop harvest, so they wanted the Hells Canyon Complex to have irrigation as its chief operating principle. This gave wind to Idaho Power’s licensing for the three Snake River dams; a single high dam would better serve power generation, but Idaho Power contended that the three-dam complex better served irrigation. While ecology shaped Hells Canyon Dam, the dam also reshaped the environment. By its very design, the Hells Canyon Complex has no passage for andronomous fish species, a type of fish that migrates from freshwater to the ocean in the Snake and Columbia Rivers. Limiting certain fish species’ ability to access any of the upper Snake River Basin between the complex to Shoshone Falls has dramatically reduced the species’ population and disturbed several ecosystems. This can be traced back to the general neglect of biological research before the construction of dams along the Columbia and Snake Rivers.

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Desert National Wildlife Refuge is the largest wildlife refuge in the continental United States, spreading over 1.6 million acres of land and six different mountain ranges in Southern Nevada within the Clark, Lincoln, and Nye Counties. President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the refuge by executive order in 1936, and at that time federal protection spanned the entirety of the current Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Mount Charleston, and much of today’s Red Rock National Recreation Area. The need for protection stemmed from the steeply declining population of native plants and animals, specifically desert bighorn sheep. Desert National Wildlife Refuge includes lands sacred to the Nuwu, also known as the Southern Paiutes. The land is the setting of Nuwu origin stories and legends as well as the lands their people lived in and thrived upon for many generations. Artifacts of the Paiutes are scattered across the land and are sacred to local Paiute communities. Greg Anderson, Chairman of the Moapa Band of Paiutes says, “We honor these gifts through the many songs we sing that talk about the natural landscape that bestows food, medicine, wildlife, water and the air we breathe. We connect to the loves, joys and struggles of our many ancestors who were here long before us.” They still practice Nuwu traditions tied to the land, which makes preserving it important to keeping traditions alive. The Desert National Wildlife Refuge is also important to the Nuwu people because it is the natural habitat of the desert bighorn sheep, or nah’gah to use the Paiute name. The nah’gah were one of the Nuwu’s main food sources. Paiute legends tell how their people were starving and the desert bighorn sheep stepped forward and sacrificed their lives so the people could survive. Nuwu view the nah’gah as protectors of their people include giving them power and energy and guiding them through drought and disease. The Nuwu strive to protect the desert bighorn sheep because they believe their people are tied to them and if they die then the Nuwu people will die as well. To this day, the Nuwu honor the nah’gah through stories, songs, and dances.

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Along with two of his friends, Hector Lee, a student from Fillmore, Utah, discovered a camel skull in a cave in the lava beds of nearby Meadow Hot Springs in 1928. He passed it along to professor A.L. Matthews of the University of Utah, who then sent it to the paleontologist Alfred Romer at the University of Chicago. The skull apparently had muscle tissue still attached to it, indicating a relatively recent provenance. Romer noted “the most obvious explanation” was that the skull was a remnant of the 1856–1866 US Camel Corps, a government experiment in using camels to service military forts and survey expeditions. Comparison with contemporary Bactrian and dromedary skulls, however, revealed this specimen was of an entirely different species: the Camelops hesternus, which had been thought to have gone extinct half a million years ago. Romer determined this find refuted the theory of such an early period of extinction for two reasons. First, the persistence of muscle on the bone could only be credible after several thousand years at the most, not half a million. Second, he drew on an 1890 geological study by G.K. Gilbert to determine that the cave in which the skull was found formed only after the fourth glaciation period, around 15,000 years ago. Romer excitedly suggested the timeline for extinction needed revision. Dr. Oliver P. Hay, who had established the previously-held early Pleistocene extinction date for C. hesternus, witheringly denounced Romer’s suggestions in an article published six months later. He contended ancient fossils could maintain muscle tissue for more than a few thousand years given the right conditions. He furthermore argued G.K. Gilbert was not aware of the multiple glacial stages that subsequent science had identified, and thus was not credible. He sardonically requested geologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists present more cogent arguments against his original theory. The question of the dating of this camel skull did, in fact, involve the anthropological field. When species such as the Camelops had been confined to the early Pleistocene, the incidence of human remains in association with them had indicated to scientists that humans must have existed at the same early time. To find that this species and others like it could have existed far later would deprive anthropology of one argument for a quite early date for human existence on the continent. Other articles in the Science journal where this debate played out confirm that other geologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists did take up Hay’s challenge and Romer’s invitation to determine whether previously-held extinction dates remained legitimate for dating the human record. The May 9, 1930 edition of Park City’s Park Record noted Hector Lee, the original skull-discoverer, helped to establish the Camelops hesternus extinction date to 25,000 years ago. Eventually, in the late 1970s, paleontologists at the University of Utah used radiocarbon technology to date the skull to about 11,000 years ago, redeeming both Romer and his revised extinction date for Camelops hesternus.

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As an instrumental wagon route across the Rocky Mountains, the Mullan Road carried much of the traffic between Fort Benton in what is now Montana to Fort Walla Walla in present-day Washington. With the discovery of placer and quartz mines in places such as Gold Creek, Virginia City, Bear Gulch, and Deer Lodge in Montana from 1862 to 1864, population and the demand for supplies boomed. Along this route plodded horses, mules, and also camels. The first arrived in Montana in 1865. Some had been bought from Nevada salt delivery trains; others had been acquired from the scattered stock of the US government’s short-lived Camel Corps. Still others may have come from the efforts of businessman Frank Laumeister to employ them in the British Columbia Cariboo Mining Company. These camels carried everything from mail to flour to nail kegs to gold dust, and they worked the routes between mining camps in the west and south of Montana territory before they began plying the Mullan Road across the Rockies. These exotic creatures made for memorable stories, including one in which a hunter shot one down thinking it was a moose, and had to surrender to the camel’s owner his cash, gun, ammunition, watch, and his deed to a claim in Ophir. Though both the camel’s owner and the Montana Post article printing the story ridiculed this hunter for being ignorant of camels, quotidian camel sightings did not remain a feature of western Montana life for long. A settler who moved to the Helena area at the age of nine in 1867 reported that by then camel trains were already the subject of stories only and not firsthand experience. A major obstacle against widespread adoption of camels, despite their load carrying capacity and remarkable endurance, was that mules and horses could not stand them. The smell and sight of camels instigated many commotions, including one that deprived Missoulans of their Fourth of July shipment of liquor. One Montana settler even claimed he won a bet based on horses’ fear of camels. Furthermore, camels had to compete not only with other, more common beasts of burden, but also with the railroads advancing across the continent. The establishment of transcontinental rail systems shaped the development of transport, trade, and settlement away from the highway of the Mullan Road that camels traveled and, eventually, away from the need for camels at all. While the 1869 track connection did not pass directly through Montana, merchants and settlers and territorial governments pioneered new southerly transportation routes to link up with the transcontinental railway. Given the opposition of many muleteers and horse handlers, it is not surprising camels were not transplanted to these new trails. Then, 1883 saw the completion of Montana’s own Northern Pacific Railroad, reducing the necessity of the Mullan Road and the camels that plied it. These Montanan camels soon faded into the stuff of legend and colorful history.

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Kingman’s newspaper, The Mohave County Miner, reported on February 25, 1893 that the “Red Ghost” had finally been laid to rest. The Red Ghost, the story explained, was a camel reported to have trampled a woman near Eagle Creek. On later sightings, viewers noticed there seemed to be something stuck to its back—and it was not a hump. A hunter named Si Hamlin caught sight of the Red Ghost from a distance and reported he thought that something was the body of a dead man. Some weeks later, some cowboys fired at it but missed. As it fled, they found it had left behind a human head. When a priest named Mizoo Hastings finally shot it, he found the camel’s back had been knotted with rawhide straps, presumably once holding on a corpse that had by now disintegrated. So The Mohave County Miner reported. Detailing events for the most part located in eastern Arizona, this article may have taken liberties with the truth using the benefit of distance and how remote the area was. Though the newspaper claimed sightings had been reported for ten years before the camel’s death at Mr. Hastings’s hands, there is no trace of earlier reports. Even Gilded Age newspapers had “fake news.” For example, Mark Twain spun hoaxes while writing for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, and according to local tradition, in 1959, editor Bob Richards wrote the city’s annual camel races into existence with a spoof story taken too seriously. The Red Ghost article, however, takes on the role of relaying a legend. Perhaps it truly was derivative and is simply the only extant written record of an oral tradition that may have spanned Arizona. Indeed, that oral tradition may not have been as outrageous as might seem. Camels did briefly roam the deserts of Arizona, having been set loose in the aftermath of the 1863 dissolution of the US Camel Corps, an army experiment in using camels to carry explorers and supplies through southwestern deserts. Kingman was especially cognizant of this camel history, as Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale had camped nearby on his 1857–1858 camel expedition from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River. The town of Kingman named a street after him and in 1901 erected the Hotel Beale. Amid Kingman’s heightened camel-consciousness due to Beale’s local fame, the story indeed could have had a grain of truth. As camels at forts from Texas to California idled during the Civil War, some either escaped or were helped to escape by minders with no fondness for them. When those remaining were finally auctioned off in 1864, they ended up in the hands of Hadji Ali, well known as Hi Jolly, one of the original Camel Corps handlers. He used them for two years in southern Arizona carrying water to sell to travelers, but eventually he also set the camels loose. Our Red Ghost may well have been a remnant of either of these dissolved government plans or business enterprise hopes.

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In Virginia City, camels arrived in 1865 to convey salt. Nevada, famed for its Comstock lode and peppered with mining towns such as Virginia City, derived much of its wealth and population from ore deposits. However, translating these deposits into a livelihood required processing the raw ore. The Washoe process, developed in the 1860s by Comstock millmen, involved heating and grinding ore in an iron vessel along with mercury and a solution of salt. Thus, the silver rush required a salt rush as well. Camels helped supply the need, bringing salt across the desert lands from the Walker River salt marsh district all the way to Virginia City. Otto Esche, a commission merchant who imported hemp as well as humped beasts from Central Asia, supplied some of these camels, hoping to install them as useful contributions to the American West. The auction intended to raffle these camels off, however, flopped, and Julius Bandmann, the agent for Esche’s commission, bought all thirteen Bactrians. He then sold them to Nevadan mining companies in need of salt transporters. Another entrepreneur, Samuel McLeneghan, purchased camels from the government when they auctioned the remains of their defunct US Camel Corps, an experiment in using dromedaries as military pack animals, in 1864. Marius Chevalier, a Frenchman, also supplied salt-packing Nevada camels. By the end of the century, the cyanide reduction process replaced salt amalgamation for ore processing. The use of camels in Nevada, though, had already declined. Camels frightened horses and mules, much more ubiquitous than they and much more familiar to the settlers and miners. Camels caused such a nuisance with their disturbance of other, more common steeds that the Nevada state government passed a law prohibiting camels from public highways in 1875. This law remains on the books today. Despite this ban, Virginia City engages in an annual sanctioned public appearance of camels in the form of their International Camel Races. According to popular legend, a spoof article written in 1959 by Robert Richards, the editor of the local paper The Territorial Enterprise, claiming that his city held camel races, fooled the editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, who reprinted it. Realizing he’d been hoodwinked, he challenged Virginia City to actually hold a camel race and offered to send a team to compete. The Hollywood director John Huston, who was filming The Misfits in northern Nevada at the time, came down to win this first race. The journalistic jocularity of this saga holds well with The Territorial Enterprise’s fame as the proving ground for the young Samuel Clemens, who first wrote under the name of Mark Twain at this newspaper. Twain similarly fabricated stories and appreciated tall tales such as the ones surrounding the origin of Virginia City’s annual Labor Day camel racing tradition.

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Fort Defiance marks the starting point of Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale’s 1857–1858 wagon road survey across the 35th parallel to the Colorado River, the very first deployment of the US Camel Corps. The government was eager to boost the efficiency of transport and trade between the East and California and furthermore wanted to survey the land acquired from the Mexican government after the Mexican–American War. Recommendations by military officials such as Major Henry C. Wayne eventually resulted in two shipments of camels, as well as camel handlers such as the Arizona-famous Hi Jolly, docking at Indianola, Texas, on May 14, 1856. From there they were moved to a fort near San Antonio. Lieutenant Beale, appointed by Major Wayne to use this Camel Corps for the wagon road survey, set out from San Antonio with twenty-eight camels on June 25, 1857. Along the way to Fort Defiance, Lieutenant Beale was to meet up with a Colonel Loring, a general who had lost one arm in the Mexican War and would later go on to help train troops in Egypt. At this early date, however, he was unacquainted with camels, and Beale rather literally left him in the dust, as the camel Beale was riding easily outpaced Loring’s horse. They met back together some two days later and reached Fort Defiance together on August 25, 1857. Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner established Fort Defiance to assert dominance over the Navajo population with a military presence. Lacking defensive fortifications, however, it took the form of a “military village,” with barracks, stables, storehouses, a civilian trading store, a hospital, and a structure for Navajos staying overnight, all arrayed around a parade ground. At this time, the fort held a tentative peace with the Native Americans of the region. They traded with the Zuni and the Navajo for food, but the fort occupied what had been grazing land, and occasional raids continued. While 1856–1857 was relatively quiet around the vicinity of the fort, Beale’s careful notes of any Native American sightings or interactions on his journey demonstrate the government’s uneasy relationship with the native inhabitants of the territory. When he reached Fort Defiance, Beale wrote in his journal that “No one who has not commanded an expedition of this kind, where everything ahead is dim, uncertain, and unknown, except the dangers, can imagine the anxiety with which I start upon this journey.” Beale himself had already led an expedition such as this, charting a “Central Route” to California in 1853 from Missouri. Seeing the camels’ performance on this expedition from Fort Defiance left Beale with great admiration for their ability to carry enormous loads, travel great distances, and go long periods of time without water. He even developed a particular affinity for one camel named Seid.  Even after the Camel Corps was officially disbanded, Beale kept a collection of camels at his ranch near Fort Tejon, California.

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