Camels draw crowd at Coronado Historic Site

BERNALILLO — In case residents of Sandoval County didn’t know, there were Camels at Coronado Historic Site in Bernalillo April 12.

Doug Baum, head of Texas Camel Corps, and his team brought three camels to the site with the purpose of educating the the public on their uses during war time and the gold rush. Despite being on crutches from farm accident-induced injury, Baum was ecstatic to share what he knows.

“If you like history, I might suggest you hang around. If you don’t like history, this is your chance to leave. Otherwise, it’s gonna be really awkward in the middle of my talk when you get up and I called you out on it,” he said at the beginning of his talk.

After thanking Coronado Historic Site for hosting, Baum took a quick survey of who in the audience was from the general Albuquerque area. It turned out the crowd was mostly made of local residents, and Baum was pleased by that.

“The reason I put such emphasis on locals is that this story we’re going to share today is hyper local, and I believe that if we embrace local history and keep it alive, certainly for younger folks, then these stories never go away,” he said.

He went on to talk about camels being used in the Army in 19th century America. He said their use wasn’t just limited to Albuquerque and gave the audience perspective on the convenience of the current century compared to back then.

“In my opinion, to make the world in the 19th century much smaller in a way that we would maybe today, in the 21st century, take for granted because of the internet right now. I can grab my phone and I can see there is in fact a notification from a young kid I know quite well in Egypt. We can communicate across the world in seconds. One hundred seventy years ago, when this story takes place, if you wanted to send a message. An old-fashioned letter that you might write from, let’s say Virginia on the East Coast to California on the west coast, that message ... could take as long as three months to cross this continent. So, the story I’m going to share with you today is very much related to that pace about the Gold Rush.”

That was a time, he said, when people were in Pennsylvania or Georgia were moving to California “certainly for the promise of wealth, but maybe for the promise of new farmland, new opportunity.”

There were two options for crossing the continent at that time, according to Baum. “One is to take a ship from the East Coast down around the tip of South America and back up to the western coast of the U.S. and the Pacifica, California and that’s a sea voyage, where there are probably eight different ways you could die. The more practical option was to cross by land, but in these times we had no method of conveyance that was faster than a horse. The historian Stephen F. Ambrose, who wrote a fantastic book about the Lewis and Clark expedition, says very famously in the 19th century that nothing moved faster than a horse could get it there.”

He asked the audience, particularly the younger generations, to remember that because it was “elemental” to the story. He explained with the news that there was gold out west, a Pennsylvania family decided the best way to travel was by wagon, on foot and on horse back.

“But again, Ambrose says nothing’s going to move faster than a horse can get it there, so this is going to be a three-month trip across the interior of our country. And as that family leaves Pennsylvania, times are good. There are rivers for water. There’s grass for grazing. When they cross the Mississippi, they get to the plains, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, still relatively green country for movement and sustenance for livestock. But when you get out here, everything changes for all of the obvious reasons,” he said.

In so many words, Baum said the environment caused problems for the travelers, such as dehydration and heat illnesses. Traveling was also made difficult to for the livestock, horses and mules. The issue became clear to members in Washington, D.C., including George Crosman, an Army advocate, according to Baum. Crosman recommended the use of camels to deal with the environment. However, before the idea gained any traction, war broke out.

“One Mississippi Senator remembers Crosman. ... This Mississippi senator had been in the Mexican-American War. He’d been in the U.S., Southwest and in northern Mexico. He’d seen the desert conditions, and he takes up the camel cause, goes to Congress in ‘53 and requests $30,000 to purchase camels,” he said.

At first, the senator was laughed at, but the idea later gained support because he snuck it into a roads and bridges bill for Illinois. The problem, said Baum, was that camels weren’t available in the U.S. and had to be shipped from the Middle East, where there was conflict. Because of that, there was a ban on camel exportation when the U.S. was trying to purchase those camels, said Baum. He also said that the U.S. was able to bribe Egypt with a trade of rifles for camels.

Baum then talked about a treacherous journey across the ocean with those camels. He said their treatment has been called into question because they were tied down in the kneeling position in cramped spaces for weeks on end. Despite this, he said, the camels, when released, got right back up with no issue.

“This should inform you on just how resilient and how tough the camel is,” Baum said.

After the camels arrived on U.S. soil, they were used by the Army for various needs, including carrying water and providing higher vantage points for some of the soldiers in the Civil War era.

Baum ended by asking the audience to contribute to historic sites like Coronado.