The Camel Corps at Fort Tejon

Picture the scene: the year is eighteen fifty-six, and a United States Army sergeant is watching his horse lose its mind. The animal has never seen a camel. Neither has anyone else at Fort Tejon, a military post dug into the Tehachapi foothills above what is now the Grapevine grade.

The camel in question is one of seventy-five imported from Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey at the direct instruction of the Secretary of War, a man named Jefferson Davis, who had concluded that the camel was the obvious solution to the Army's logistical problems in the American Southwest. Davis was not wrong about the camels. They could carry more than mules, drink less water, and navigate rocky terrain that broke horses.

He was very wrong about the horses. Every Army mule and cavalry mount at Fort Tejon reacted to the newcomers with something between panic and permanent hostility. Officers began filing reports questioning the program's practicality.

The camels were excellent. The camels were also ruining the Army. The herd was managed in part by a Syrian handler known on Army payrolls as Hadji Ali, which American soldiers rendered, roughly, as Hi Jolly.

He was the one person in the Southwest who actually understood the animals, who could read their moods and work with their famously expressive contempt for human incompetence. When the Civil War broke out and the Army dissolved the program, the herd was auctioned off to private buyers and mining operators. Hi Jolly stayed in the territory, worked odd jobs, married, and eventually settled in Arizona.

He died in Quartzsite in nineteen-oh-two. The state of Arizona later erected a pyramid monument over his grave. The camels dispersed into the Mojave and Sonoran deserts.

Fort Tejon's interpretive materials record that sightings of feral camels continued into the nineteen hundreds, though that claim has not been verified beyond the park's own records. It is the kind of detail that feels too good to check. The last U.

S. Army camel, wandering somewhere in the Sonoran desert decades after the program that imported it was forgotten. Fort Tejon is twenty minutes off the freeway at Exit one-four-nine.

The parade ground is intact. The barracks walls are standing. They do not mention the camels in the highway signs, which is exactly the problem.