The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 26

unheeded. However, in 1847 his urgings, amplified by those of Major Henry C.
Wayne, won the consideration of Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. 2 The son
of frontiersman and camel rider Edward F. Beale specified an alternative version
to this origin story in a newspaper article:
The idea came to General Beale when he was exploring Death
Valley with Kit Carson. He had carried with him a book of
travels in China and Tartary, and it occurred to him that with
the camel the Arizona desert would become less terrible.
Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, sympathized with
(General) Beale, and a supply ship sailed, under command of
David Dixon Porter, Beale’s kinsman, for Tunis, where a herd
of camels was purchased. 3
Money and support were crucial if this project was going to gain
traction. In the last days of the 1851 session of Congress, when the army
appropriation bill was under deliberation, Davis presented an amendment
providing for the acquisition of thirty camels and twenty dromedaries, with ten
Arab drivers and the essential equipment. 4 During this time, miners were
extracting gold in California, thousands of people were exploring the western
plains, and a transcontinental railway was only at best a vague vision. Posted at
Fort Yuma, between California and Arizona on the Colorado Desert was Edward
F. Beale, then a lieutenant. A torrent of westward migration and goods passed that
way every week. The sickness, misery, and heavy death rate amongst horses and
mules in the arid, solar warmth persuaded Beale that the camels of the Sahara and
Arabia could be beneficial to the Army in that region. He wrote extensively on
the topic to Davis. He arranged images displaying numerous potential uses for the
“ship of the desert,” including transporting field cannons across their backbones
and moving sharpshooters to the front. 5
Davis could not launch and sustain this project alone. In fact, this proved
to be one of the eventual pitfalls of the experiment. However, when U.S. forces
were required to function in dry desert areas, the President and Congress began to
take the idea seriously. Freshly appointed as Secretary of War by President
Franklin Pierce in 1853, Davis established an army goal of developing
transportation into the southwestern United States, which he and most onlookers
believed to be an enormous desert. In his annual report for 1854, Davis penned, “I
again invite attention to the advantages to be anticipated from the use of camels
and dromedaries for military and other purposes.” 6
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