Fort Tejon and the Camel Corps Experiment

The Army built Fort Tejon in eighteen fifty-four on a flat bench in the Tehachapi Mountains just south of where you are now, establishing a garrison that was intended to protect travelers on the newly opened Tejon Pass route and to oversee the nearby Sebastian Indian Reservation, established in eighteen fifty-three. The fort served those purposes with mixed results for a decade, and its operational history is reasonably well documented in military records. What is less expected in that record is the camels.

In eighteen fifty-seven, the United States Army's Camel Corps experiment delivered a herd of camels to Fort Tejon as part of a broader test to determine whether the animals could serve as pack animals in the American Southwest. The experiment had been proposed and championed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who reasoned that the desert terrain of the American Southwest resembled the environments where camels performed reliably, and that the American mule was poorly adapted to the conditions soldiers might face in the territories acquired after the Mexican-American War.

The camels were brought to Fort Tejon from Texas, where the first shipment of about thirty-three animals had arrived from the Middle East and North Africa in eighteen fifty-six. The animals performed reasonably well as pack animals in tests conducted in the surrounding terrain. They carried loads that would have exhausted mules, moved efficiently in the heat, and did not require the water that horses and mules needed over long desert crossings. The experiment suggested the concept was sound.

Then the Civil War broke out. Jefferson Davis, the camel program's champion, went south to lead the Confederacy. The Army's institutional attention shifted entirely to the war. The camel program had no advocate and no mission. The animals at Fort Tejon were auctioned off or released. Some were spotted roaming the Mojave Desert decades later. The camel program died not from failure but from the collapse of the context that made it make sense.

Fort Tejon is now a California State Historic Park. The camel history is interpreted on the grounds. The mule won, eventually, by default.