In the 1850s, United States soldiers in full uniform really did trek across the deserts of Texas and Arizona on camels. In this episode we explore the United States Camel Corps, one of the most bizarre and little-known experiments in American military history, and a case study in how a genuinely brilliant idea can be doomed by spectacularly bad timing.

We start with the logistical nightmare of horses and mules dying of dehydration in the Southwest, the officers George H. Crosman and Henry C. Wayne who first proposed camels, and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis who lobbied Congress for a $30,000 appropriation. We follow the USS Supply on its Mediterranean shopping trips, Lieutenant David Dixon Porter’s floating barn with canvas harnesses that suspended camels during storms, and the field tests in which camels carried 600 pounds, went days without water, and survived a rattlesnake bite while mules died of thirst. Then we explain how the Civil War, the stigma of Davis, cavalry culture, and the steam locomotive killed the program, and how feral camels wandered into Western folklore.

• Why camels outperformed mules, from oval red blood cells to their ability to eat the toxic creosote bush
• The surprising fact that camel ancestors evolved in North America, making the experiment an interrupted homecoming
• Edward Fitzgerald Beale’s conversion from skeptic to advocate on the 35th parallel wagon road survey
• The Confederate receipt for 80 camels at Camp Verde and King Mongkut of Siam’s offer of elephants, declined by Lincoln
• The legend of the Red Ghost, the last wild sighting in 1891, and the camel-topped pyramid grave of driver Hi Jolly in Quartzsite, Arizona