27 May 2026

In 1855, U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis imported 75 camels from Egypt and Tunisia to serve as pack animals in the American Southwest. The Army Camel Corps operated for several years and the camels proved genuinely suited to desert terrain. The Civil War ended the experiment. Some camels were auctioned off; others simply released. Credible reports of feral camels wandering Arizona and Texas persisted into the early 1900s.