that brief period of time when we had feral camels roaming around menacing Arizona. I think about that a lot.
in 1857 the U.S. Congress spent $30,000 importing 72 camels to be “employed for military purposes” in the american southwest. by modern standards, this was not a particularly outrageous misuse of military spending. the experiment itself was unsuccessful (and strongly lobbied against by, I shit you not, Mule Lobbyists), and the camels were eventually put up for auction. part of the herd was shipped to Nevada (after a brief detour for an organized camel racing event in Sacramento), with others being purchased by various entrepreneurs, mining companies, and traveling zoos. the former army camels then began to breed with larger civilian herds—it transpires that private businesses had imported hundreds in anticipation of a booming market in commercial camel trading. this anticipation failed to materialize.
in short, some of these camels ended up in Arizona, where they were used to build the transcontinental railroad. after construction was complete, the camel demand died down and remaining herd members were sold off or turned loose in the desert. Which is how a small but persistent number of Feral Camels came to roam the Arizona desert for a Brief and Glorious Period of 30 Years
(including one particularly bloodthirsty and legendary cryptid named Red Ghost, the subject of multiple manhunts, whose reign of terror lasted a solid decade. but that is a bedtime story for another night. sweetest dreams, and try not to count camels as you drift off to sleep—they have a habit of wandering off and starting ruckus)
This also happened in Australia and now we have this annoying feral camel population that people are always recapturing and breeding to export to Afghanistan.
