Camels in the Intermountain West

5 Locations | Curated by Emily Moore, Northern Arizona University

After evolutionarily originating in the Americas, camels returned to the American West as pack animals in a U.S. military experiment as well as a series of transportation enterprises. These exotic creatures inspired wild tales and jovial narratives reported in newspaper articles and local lore. Of course, as new as camels seemed to nineteenth-century Westerners, a twentieth-century fossil discovery revealed the imported beasts had ancestry in the region that was surprisingly recent, at least on geologic time scales.

Camel stories both true and tall, both antique and ancient, range throughout the Intermountain West.

The US government brought camels to the Southwest to use them in the short-lived US Camel Corps, formed in 1857 and lasting until 1863, which experimented with the pack animals for military use. Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale used them to survey a wagon route from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River, charting the “dim, uncertain, and unknown.”
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Camels traversed to and from Virginia City carrying salt to the mines to process gold and silver ore. They have lingered in contemporary Virginia City life in the form of the International Camel Races thanks to journalistic playfulness in the tradition of Mark Twain.
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In 1893, The Mohave County Miner reported on what is now an Arizona legend: the Red Ghost, a rampant camel with a dead man strapped to its back. The story may have been fictional, but it was not as unlikely as one might expect.
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Though camels were well adapted to the harsh conditions of little water and extreme temperatures that prevail in the American West, they never became common beasts of burden because they frightened the ubiquitous horses and mules. The advent of railroads also made them obsolete for improving supply lines.
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