The "Having The Camel Hair Pulled Over Their Eyes!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading about a rather unusual topic...camels!  Learned more United States history today than I have in a long time.  And....it all had to do with camels!  You know...the animals with either one hump or two humps.  Goes back to 1851 when Jefferson Davis was a United States Senator and future president of the Confederacy.  Seems he had proposed to import 50 African and Asian camels into the American Southwest with the idea that he could use them to hunt down Indigenous people in the region, thus asserting U.S. control across the continent.  He believed that once safe passage could be secured from Texas to Southern California, white Southerners cold begin to move west in large numbers and bring their slaves with them, thus the camels would help to expand slavery in Southern states.  And...he did it!  After four years of lobbying in Congress he received funding for his camel project.  At the time he was Secretary of War and could oversee the project.  He picked his own agents who set off on a world tour, with stops in Tunis, Constantinople, Cairo and Smyrna who collected a variety of camels and dromedaries as well as Turkish and Arab handlers.  In April of 1856 a cargo of 34 animals landed in Indianola, Texas and nine month later another 41 arrived.  The camels were hard workers and drew crowds of spectators as then hauled large amounts of hay.  Between 1857 and 1859, Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale employed dozens of camels in several high-profile expeditions across the Southwest.  Camel enthusists grew in numbers and observers could see that the camels could survive without water for long stretches of time, manage heavy loads, travel more than 30 miles a day while consuming less food than horses and mules.  But, they did have their faults.  They sneezed, shedded, gave off a foul odor and had the tendency to regurgitate on passersby.  And, some even began to realize that the camels were part of Davis's veiled proslavery plot.  Then Congress refused to fund the animals anymore.  By that time there were more than 80 camels scattered across forts in Texas and California.  The camels could work on the Southern plantations and work faster and harder than mules, thus working the slaves harder to keep up with them.  Slaveholders began to clamor for more camels.  In 1858, a cargo of 89 camels docked in Galveston, Texas and several month later 21 more camels arrived in Mobile, Alabama.  Most could not see that the camels were being used as a smokescreen to help smuggle African captives into North America.  By this time the United States had outlawed the African slave trade, but most did not notice that captive Africans could be stored in the same ship's hold as the camels.  It seems that Mr. John A. Machado, the main importer of camels to the States was also a notorious slave trader.  The camels were a cover for his importation of captive Africans who were usually stored in the ship's hold.  The smell of the camels covered the smell produced by the captive Africans.  Then along came the Civil War which brought an end to the camel trade.   Camels did make a few appearances in Union and Confederate armies during the war, but they weren't widely employed.  By the end of the war most had ben auctioned off or set loose.  Some found their way into zoos and circuses while others disappeared into the wild.  For years and years travelers reported seeing strange beasts moving across the desert landscape of the Southwest.  One such sighting added to the story of the "Red Ghost" who was said to rampage across the West with a headless rider on his back.  Today the historic mining town of Virginia City, Nevada holds camel races every year.  These original residents of our country were more than a mere curiosity.  These transplanted camels were used to expand the insititution of slavery, beginning with the Secretary of War and continuing with individual planters and slave traders.  The senators who snickered at Jefferson Davis in 1851 when he unveiled his pet project had little notion of how deep the plot would run.  Seems his experiment outfoxed many!  So...how many of you have seen a camel walking around the neighborhood recently?  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.