The Camel Corps

The United States Army had a camel corps. That is not the surprising part.

In 1855 Congress set aside thirty thousand dollars for the War Department to go buy camels. It was not a joke and nobody treated it as one. The Army was trying to move men and freight across a Southwest with no water in it, and the mules were dying. So a Navy storeship sailed for the Mediterranean, bought what it could, and landed the first of them on the Texas coast in the spring of 1856. Something like seventy came over on two trips. The Army gave them a home post at Camp Verde, northwest of San Antonio, and went to work.

The surprising part is that it worked. The camels carried loads that would have broken a mule, went days without water, ate scrub that nothing else would touch, and crossed ground the Army had written off. In 1857 Edward Beale took a string of them west to survey a wagon road along the 35th parallel and came back a believer. The route he mapped is roughly the line Route 66 and Interstate 40 follow today. The Army's own account of buying the animals and shipping them home had already gone to the Senate that year as Executive Document No. 62, which is the number printed on this shirt. It is a public document. You can go read it.

What killed the program was not the camels. The horses hated them, the mules bolted from them, and the packers had no notion how to work an animal nobody in the country had ever handled, so the Army sent overseas for men who could. One of them, remembered ever since as Hi Jolly, stayed and spent the rest of his life in the Southwest. Then the war came, Camp Verde was lost with the rest of the Texas posts, and the experiment simply stopped. The camels were auctioned off in the years afterward, to circuses and mining outfits and whoever else showed up. Some were turned loose, and for fifty years people kept reporting camels out in the desert.

There is no real patch for the U.S. Camel Corps. There could not be. The Army did not put insignia on shoulders until the First World War, sixty years too late, and it was never a formal corps anyway, just an experiment somebody gave a name to. So we drew the patch it never got, and we drew it straight, the way any unit would have worn it. The date is real, the document number is real, and the camel is real. That is the only reason it is funny.

What it stands for:

• The Camel Corps, a good idea that was tried in earnest and proved out
• Hi Jolly and the cameleers the Army sent halfway around the world for, who made it work and stayed
• A country practical enough to try the strange answer while the sensible one was failing

The camels did everything the Army asked of them. Then the country went to war with itself, and never got back to it.

Designed in America. Made to last.