'A land of hardship and distress': Camels, North American Deserts and the Limits of Conquest

Abstract

In 1848, having just concluded a war of conquest against Mexico, the United States seized a large portion of northern Mexico, much of which was desert. In the 1850s, the US struggled to extend its sovereignty over this unfamiliar desert territory. To conquer the desert, the US secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, imported camels from the Ottoman Empire, hoping to build a camel-mounted military unit that would impose US will on the arid region. By the 1860s, however, the camels had either perished in droughts or been sold to circuses or menageries. The failure of the camel experiment points to the limits of exotic animal invasions, but more importantly it reveals a curious prologue to the better-known story of US dam-building and irrigation in arid regions: at first, rather than try to transform the desert, the US tried to adapt to it.