Uncle Sam’s camels never quite caught on in West

By Finn J.D. John
November 17, 2024

IN THE EARLY 1980s, on Stark Street in Southeast Portland, there was an aging Hudson Oil Co. gas station that never seemed to get much business.

It had an appearance reminiscent of a Kmart store three years ago, like a neglected outpost of a once-huge nationwide business that was slowly fading away — which was in fact the case.

Hudson Oil Co., at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, had about 300 gas stations in 36 states, plus an oil refinery. It was owned and managed by an oil tycoon named Mary Hudson, a remarkable woman who founded the business in 1933 when she was just 21 years old. She launched it by borrowing $200 from her father and using it to open a gas station in Kansas City. At her peak, Hudson was one of only three women on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the U.S. At her downfall in 1982, she was convicted of felony theft for tweaking her company’s gas pumps to short-change customers, a desperate move made to try to stave off bankruptcy after her company got caught unprepared for a sudden glut on the crude-oil market.

But probably the most interesting thing about the Stark Street Hudson station was the giant wall mural on its side. The left side of the mural showed two big Arabian camels with packsaddles on them towering over a miner-49er-type guy pitching a little pup-tent camp; the right side was taken up with a large colorful map of the U.S. with the words “36 States” printed over the top of it.

“First it was camels in the west,” reads the type over the picture. “Now HUDSON serves you best!”

As advertising, this mural was a bit of a mixed bag. It did attract attention, but mostly it was the wrong kind. Most people who looked at it probably wondered how a company could have gotten big enough to be in 36 states without learning what kind of animals cowboys and miner-49ers used. Mules, yes; horses, sure; but — camels?

Well, as it turns out, camels did have a role to play in the American West. They started out strong, and hopes were high that they would be a great addition to the frontier transportation infrastructure; but then their number-one booster disgraced himself by doing something super illegal, and the camels kind of fell out of favor in the West and faded away.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s not such a bad analogy for Hudson Oil Co. after all.

THE IDEA OF using camels in the desert country of the American Southwest was an old one, of course; you really can’t cross a desert without thinking of camels, and large swaths of the old Southwest were desert lands. An Army major named George Crossman proposed the idea in 1837, but it went nowhere at the time.

Then the Mexican-American war broke out, and when it ended in 1848 a whole bunch of desert and desert-ish lands came into the American fold. One of the Army guys tasked with patrolling the new territory, Major Henry Wayne, got very interested in the possibilities of camels as cavalry mounts. He reached out to a close personal friend who happened to be a U.S. Senator from Mississippi, and pitched him on an ambitious plan to import hundreds of camels for the Army.

Wayne’s politician friend also got very excited about the idea, and started lobbying for the camels in the Senate. He introduced bills in Congress in 1851 and again in 1852. Both times, the bills were literally laughed out of committee.

But the Senator was nothing if not persistent, as you’ll know if you’ve guessed his identity. His name was Jefferson Davis, and you surely will recognize his name either as the main villain of the American Civil War, or the main villain of The Dukes of Hazzard — Jefferson Davis “Boss” Hogg.

Hogg — er, Davis — kept trying throughout the 1850s to get Congress to go for his camel-importation scheme, but nothing happened until 1854, when he was appointed Secretary of War by President Franklin Pierce.

Promptly Secretary Hogg — I mean, Secretary Davis — got a $30,000 appropriation to outfit an expedition of Army officers to travel to the near East and buy a large and eclectic assortment of different breeds and types of camels.

The Army found the camels to be really great as beasts of burden, especially for crossing long stretches of dry country. They could carry two to four times as much weight as a mule could take on, and of course could travel much farther between water sources.

But they quickly found they were absolutely awful for any actual military use. Soldiers hated working with them. In close formation, they often smelled atrocious, and their aroma frightened horses.

Also, training a camel to do military things could be tricky. Camels chewed a cud, which they could spit with considerable force and accuracy. Many a soldier, trying to discipline a camel or just doing something nearby that alarmed the beast, found himself covered in gelatinous, putrid goo.

“This, and the camels’ ability to defecate without any warning whatsoever to anyone standing in their rear (such as the lifting of a tail, as horses and mules do) quickly overrode whatever lovable or useful qualities they may have possessed,” writes military historian John Shapard.

But as pack animals, they really were a marvel. The largest camels could carry 1,500 pounds of freight, which is more than many modern pickup trucks can haul.

Unfortunately for the camels, just as their load-hauling capacities were starting to be appreciated, the Civil War broke out. The things the camels were good at were tasks that were no longer priorities for the Army now that there was a shooting war going on. And also, folks were acutely aware that the camels had been Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s pet project.

There was another public-relations issue the camels had, too. In the few years just before the Civil War, a number of southern civilian shippers had started importing camels from Africa — or claiming to. Lots of ships set out for Africa, and returned with a heavy load; and yet nobody ever seemed to actually see any of the camels they were all bringing back in such apparently great numbers.

There was, and is, plenty of reason to believe those shippers were actually smuggling slaves on those ships — the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed years earlier, although slavery was still legal. Ordinarily slave ships could be identified by their large water tanks and by their awful smell, both of which were easily explained by a cargo of camels. So the idea was, they'd set up half a dozen or so camels on the deck of the ship as window dressing, and stuff the cargo hold below with humans.

There were, and are, people who wonder if this was the real, secret reason for future Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s enthusiasm for the camel-importation scheme.

In any case, it all added up to a pretty bad taste in the mouths of Union policymakers. So in 1864, the camels were all auctioned off.

Several circuses bought camels from the Army, and about 80 ranchers in the Southwest bought one or two as well. Others were just turned loose to shift as best they might in the wild, and for a while there was a population of wild camels roaming around Arizona. There’s an especially interesting legend around a camel known as the “Red Ghost” which supposedly had a saddle on it with a decomposing corpse tied to it — apparently a rider who suffered injuries that made it hard to stay in the saddle, who tied himself in place in the vain hope that the camel would carry him to safety. That story is a bit off topic for us, but is well worth looking up.

IN OREGON, A few of the surplus camels ended up on pack trains running supplies into remote mining camps. There are references in newspaper articles to camels being used on the Umatilla-to-Boise run in the 1860s, and from Walla Walla to the Kootenai mining district. Also, there were two camels on the steamship Brother Jonathan when it struck a hidden reef and sank while steaming to Portland in 1865. The doomed camels had been headed for mining operations in the Owyhee area of southeast Oregon. Pack-train operators seem to have really appreciated the brawny beasts.

But within a few years, railroads had been built that pretty much eliminated the need for far-traveling beasts of burden in the backcountry, and the camels’ higher maintenance requirements compared with mules or horses just made them more trouble than most operators felt they were worth.

So, like the Hudson Oil Company a century later, they just kind of faded from the scene, leaving only memories of scenes of picturesque incongruousness in the minds of folks who had been lucky enough to see one from a distance — and less pleasant memories in the minds of those unlucky enough to be standing directly behind one when Nature called!

(Sources: “Camels in the Inland Empire,” an article by T.C. Elliott published in the June 1929 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; “The U.S. Army Camel Corps, 1856-66,” an article by John Shepard published in the August 1975 issue of Military Review; “The U.S. Army’s ‘Camel Corps’ experiment,” an article by Vince Hawkins published without a date on the Army Historical Foundation’s Website.)

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