Camels for Uncle Sam

Julie Yates Walton

Yancey takes a curious, little-known fact--that camels once roamed the U.S. Southwest--and makes a highly readable history book. In the late 1850s, before the railroad connected the east and west coasts, transportation depended on horses, mules, and oxen, which depended on plenty of water. The Southwest's scarcity of water prompted an army experiment in which camels were imported from the Middle East. The book chronicles the ups and downs of this experiment, which eventually failed due to a combination of the cantankerous nature of the camels and the ignorance and politics of the humans. What makes this book so enjoyable is Yancey's smooth storytelling. She includes great camel trivia (50 trips to the zoo couldn't educate this well) and plentiful quotations, drawings, and insights into the human personalities who just couldn't quite embrace these irascible immigrants. This is an unusual but solid supplement to the study of nineteenth-century expansion and transportation.