Fort Tejon: Camel Corps and the Biggest Quake California Ever Felt

The ruins you are passing through Tejon Pass mark the site of Fort Tejon, one of the stranger outposts the United States Army ever built in the West. Established on June twenty-fourth, eighteen fifty-four, the fort sat in a mountain pass connecting the San Joaquin Valley to the Los Angeles Basin and was designed to protect settlers and suppress rustling and raids by Paiute and Mojave travelers passing through this corridor.

The fort's most peculiar chapter came in eighteen fifty-seven and fifty-eight when it became the western terminus of the Army's experimental Camel Corps. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who would later lead the Confederacy, had championed the idea. Seventy-three camels were imported from the Middle East and tested as pack animals through the desert Southwest. Fort Tejon was their California base. The experiment had a certain logic: camels could carry far more than mules, needed less water, and found the heat no problem at all. The problem was that they spooked every horse they encountered and proved so temperamental that soldiers refused to handle them. The Camel Corps was quietly abandoned when the Civil War began.

On January ninth, eighteen fifty-seven, the ground under Fort Tejon moved in a way no one there had ever experienced. A magnitude seven-point-nine earthquake ruptured the San Andreas Fault along a surface break of two hundred seventeen miles, the longest rupture ever recorded in California's written history. Ground displacement reached six meters in places. Fences miles from the epicenter were bent sideways. The Kern River reportedly ran backward for a time. Only two people died, because California outside of San Francisco remained sparsely settled.

Seismologists today consider the eighteen fifty-seven Tejon earthquake among the two or three largest ever to strike California, rivaling and perhaps exceeding the great San Francisco earthquake of nineteen oh six. The same fault segment is now known as one of the most hazardous seismic zones in North America, and geologists study it closely for signs the stress is rebuilding.