The Forgotten Story of The US Army Camel Corps

Birthed from the mind of Jefferson Davis (yes, that Jefferson Davis)

(By Gwinn Heap — Illustration for Jefferson Davis’ report to the Senate in 1857 (Senate Documents, 34th Congress, 3d sess., serial 881, pp. 179), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23597865)

Before Jefferson Davis was the infamous president of the Confederate States of America, he was the Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. Davis’s service as both a soldier in the Mexican-American War and as Secretary of War are both credited for his astute running of his side of the Civil War. However, not everything Davis did was a surprising military success. Jefferson Davis oversaw one of the oddest programs in American history when he founded the US Army Camel Corps.

There were two major problems with the idea of an American camel corps. First, North America has no native camels. The last species of camels living in the United States went extinct thousands of years ago meaning that all camel stock would need to be imported. Second, Americans were wholly unfamiliar with camels. The American soldier was a horseman but had no experience with the unruly dromedary.

Unsurprisingly, when Davis first breached the idea with Congress, he was laughed out of the room. But for some reason, that did not dissuade Davis from pursuing his dream of seeing camels in the US Army. Despite facing two humiliating defeats in 1851 and 1852, Davis was finally successful in 1855. Congress finally relented and did…