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Edward Fitzgerald Beale (1822-93) http://tinyurl.com/EBeale

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Camel Express

From Report of Edward Fitzgerald Beale to the Secretary of War Concerning the Wagon Road from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River, 1858.

Reader: Daniel Maloney

Before the coming of the railroad, one way to send mail across country was by pony express. But at least one visionary government official imagined a more exotic means.

Surveying a desert route from New Mexico to California, Edward Fitzgerald Beale decided to try something different. He brought some camels along.

My admiration for the camels increases daily with my experience of them. The harder the test they are put to the more fully they seem to justify all that can be said of them. They pack water for others four days under a hot sun and never get a drop; they pack heavy burdens of corn and oats for months and never get a grain; and on the bitter greasewood and other worthless shrubs not only subsist but keep fat; withal, they are so perfectly docile and so admirably contented with whatever fate befalls them. No one could do justice to their merits or value in expeditions of this kind, and I look forward to the day when every mail route across the continent will be conducted and worked altogether with this economical and noble brute.

Alas Edward Fitzgerald Beale's vision of a "camel express" never materialized, and many of his noble beasts were eventually auctioned off.