Camels have a unique place in American history

Jefferson Davis’s name is inextricably linked to the American Civil War, during which the politician who represented Mississippi in the United States Senate served as president of the Confederate States. But Davis’s influence on the United States predated the nation’s civil war, and he even played a notable role in one of the more unique events in American military history. While serving as Secretary of War in 1855, Davis ordered Brevet Major Henry C. Wayne to arrange for the importation of camels to be used for military purposes. Davis had urged Congress to establish a United States Army Camel Corps. for years, and even formally introduced measures to establish such a unit in the early 1850s, efforts that ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Though few might associate camels with the United States, Davis’s campaign to bring camels into the American military fold was not as eccentric as it might seem in modern times. According to the Army University Press, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which officially ended the Mexican-American War upon its signing in 1848, added more than half a million square miles of land to the United States, a significant portion of which included desert lands in what is now the American southwest. The discovery of gold in California around this same time also increased traffic in this new region of the country, which remained dangerous even after the signing of the treaty. Advocates of a camel corps insisted the animals would allow the U.S. Army, tasked with keeping the region safe, to do their job more effectively. Though the camel experiment ultimately failed due to a number of variables, it remains a unique and lesser known event in American military history.