American Camels

What would it take for the use of camels to catch on in the southwest?
Yes this was an idea of Jefferson Davis for the US Army. Would it have worked?
 
Jefferson Davis's idea was to use them as cavelry mounts in the desarts insted of horses. Also could camels have survived here in the wild after that experament?
 
Expanding on my 'point', the reason they failed was because they were used too little. As pack animals attached to traditional horse cavalry they were a nuisance precisely because they scare horses (their smell I believe). However if they had been established as full blown cavalry units in their own right they probably would have excelled, as every colonial power in Saharan Africa can attest to, the Romans included. Yanqui camels versus Mexican hussars would be over before sabres touched. Meanwhile their survivability would have been a great asset for hunting Apache into the deep wilderness.

My first thought is ATL The Searchers would be even odder to OTL eyes. Is the Duke still cool on top of a Dromedary? Probably still just as racist...
 
Huh... I never knew Jefferson Davis was behind the whole US Army camel scheme. I guess that would then make those Siamese war elephants Lincoln's corollary to this whole affair. ;)
 
The Australian Outback is sandy, like the deserts that camels are use to. The American Outback tends to be a bit rockier, which isn't so good on their soft feet.

The Bactrian Camel's native to the Eurasian Steppes and areas that are'nt exactly all sand.
 
They were used in the interior of British Columbia during the gold rush. An entrepreneur imported a bunch of them in the 1860's. They were used to pack supplies for prospectors. Last one died near the turn of the century.

Cariboo_camel.gif


Cariboo Camels.
 
Delay the transcontinental railroad's construction by 2-3 decades. Such time might suffice for camels (Arabian or otherwise) to be extensively utilized in N. America. It would certainly be interesting to think what form caravanserais would assume, though Central and S. America could most benefit from adopting camels as beasts of burden. OTL they were stymied in part by muleteers and burrow-raising interests.
 
Why hunt them when you can ride them? Apaches on camels; why not?

IIRC, hunting them is exactly how the camels were wiped out... after the army turned them loose, the camels did survive for a time, but Apaches (and all the others) saw them as a big pile of easy meat, and killed them all...
 
Top