SYMHC Classics: The Red Ghost of Arizona and the U.S. Camel Corps

We're revisiting the story of a a mysterious beast that trampled a woman in Arizona in 1883. First described as a demon, the creature turned out to be a camel. But what was it doing in the American Southwest in the first place?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We are coming up on an anniversary
for the US Camel Corps. On March third, Congress approved
the Appropriation bill that set aside money for the purchase
of those camels, So this seemed like a good time
to re release our episode on the Camel Corps. Also,
this is a story about working animals in the eighteen fifties,

(00:24):
so the animal cruelty standards definitely do not match up
to what you might expect today, So just know that
going in. Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class
from stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:46):
I'm Holly Fry, I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh and this
topic is one we've actually been asked about a couple
of times. It's another one that's also been on my
list for a long time. I'm kind of trying to
go back to the ones that I wrote down when
we first moved on to the podcast as host, that
I was really excited about and then they get lost
in the shuffle. You know what happened to mine? What
we moved offices and my my white bark got a
race the white board with my stuff on. I got

(01:08):
a raise. Yeah, so yeah, I'm going back to some
of those because I always intended to do them. And
this one is a little bit of a ghost story.
It's got a little bit of US military history, and
it also features animals, so it's kind of a wacky
mixed bag in terms of topics. And I decided to
kind of back off of doing much of an intro
on it because I kind of love the oddness of

(01:30):
the story and I want listeners to sort of hear
how it plays out, like there's an explanation of what
initially seems supernatural to some people. Um, so we're just
gonna kind of set the scene and then kind of
explain what was really going on and how that came
to be. So it starts in three uh, and at

(01:54):
this point a mysterious beast was spotted in Arizona. This
is the first time that this particular one is spot it. Uh.
And most of this story at the beginning, I should say,
is all reported by the Mohave County Miner, which was
a small newspaper, UH, And I didn't have access to
those particular ones. I have it written as relayed by

(02:15):
another researcher, So just heads up on that. So in three,
there were these two women who were home with their
children while the men of the family were away tending
their sheep flock, and they had had some issues with
Native Americans and sheep issues uh that are not really
germane to the story, but so uh. While the men

(02:35):
were away and these two women were at home alone
with the children, they had an encounter which would unfortunately
prove fatal for one of them. So, according to the legend,
shortly after one of the women left the house on
Eagle Creek to go get some water, the dogs started barking,
and that prompted the other woman to go to the
window and see what was going on. And what she

(02:57):
saw she described as an enormous red beast ridden by
the devil. Uh. She heard screams, but because she was
too terrified to leave the house, she just kind of
barricaded the door. She is said to have kind of
frantically said prayers the rest of the time until the
men returned. So when the men came home and heard

(03:19):
her story, they immediately mounted a search party for the
other woman who had gone out to get water, but
they didn't get far because they found her nearby trampled
to death and because this was sort of a mysterious death.
There was some suspicion initially by the um the authorities
that examined the body, that maybe she had been murdered

(03:40):
by someone in the family, even though the condition of
the body was obviously very unique and that it had
been trampled. There was an inquest, but in the end
the verdict and the investigation was reported in the local paper,
the Majabbi County Minor that I mentioned as quote death
in some manner unknown. So, just a few days after that,
and a few miles northeast of the first sighting, two

(04:03):
prospectors woke up in the night when their tent was crushed.
They returned to their mining camp in or, Arizona with
tales of this impossibly tall horse. When a party made
its way back to the trampled camp, they found red
hairs and large hoofprints in the area. And naturally, this
on top of the uh, the woman having been killed

(04:26):
in this sort of mysterious way, uh really sort of
started this, you know, cultural phenomenon that is very natural
of tall tales and gossip about what started to be
called the red ghost. And some of the people talking
about it claimed that they had seen and even pursued
the Red Ghost. One said he saw it vanish into
thin air before his eyes, so they really were laying

(04:48):
on the supernatural abilities. At this point. About a month
after the death of the woman at Eagle Creek, a
rancher named Cyrus Hamblin was out getting stray cattle, kind
of rounding them up, when he spotted the beast near
the Salt River, And this was eighty miles northeast of
the earlier sightings, and unlike previous encounters, he knew what

(05:10):
it was. It was a camel, Yeah, he uh. It
was not entirely unheard of for camels to be in
this area. Unusual, but not unheard of. Uh. And Hamblin
could see that there was also some sort of load
that was strapped to the animals back, but he couldn't
get close enough to catch the camel or identify what

(05:31):
that was on his back, but he said that he
believed that it looked like a deceased man, and eventually
the camel escaped him. Hamblin's word on the matter solidified
this whole story of the Red Ghost, which people also
called the Fantasia Colorado. That was what the Spanish speaking,
settlers of the area primarily called it the rancher. Was

(05:51):
was well respected, and his tail was not really embellished.
He didn't put a lot of, you know, crazy spin
on it. He didn't throw in any supernatural or fantastical elements,
except for the part that there was probably a dead
man on the creature's back, which some people were kind
of skeptical about. Yeah, but he was very matter of

(06:12):
fact about it, like, I think there was a dead
guy on the back of that camel, which is a
phrase you never think you're gonna say, but there you go.
Uh So, several weeks after Hamlin's incident, this time about
sixty miles to the west of where Hamblin had had
his encounter, another group of prospectors spotted what was believed
to be the same animal, this at this point having

(06:32):
been still believed by some people to be supernatural and
others to be like, no, no, it's camel. Uh They
thought that the best course of action was just to
start firing wildly at it, and they didn't actually hit
it however, or if they did, they merely grazed it.
But as it ran for its life, the burden that
was on its back because there was something on its
back dislodged, and the prospectors, once the camel had gone,

(06:56):
advanced on this fallen cargo, and what they actually discover
was in fact a human skull with some hair and
a very few shreds of decomposed skin still clinging to it.
And so in this moment, Cyrus Hamblin's story was completely
corroborated by this rather grizzly discovery. So it once again
supported No, no, he is really a stand up guy

(07:17):
that doesn't talk crazy. There is a dead guy on
that camel's back. Yeah. In so, ten years after the
first sightings of the Red Ghost, a man by the
name of Missoo Hastings found a red camel eating in
his garden in or Arizona, and this time he shot
it dead. The camel had straps of leather still tied

(07:38):
to it, and in some places the straps had cut
into its flesh. This residual strap work led people to
conclude that this was the same camel that had been
running around the area with a corpse strap to it
for the last ten years. Yeah, the corpse wasn't actually
there the whole time, but it was a very intricate
like a netting almost of these straps, so he had

(07:59):
been wearing those strap ups and presumably pieces of this
deceased person for quite some time. But who the dead
man was remains something of a mystery. I read your
notes is where the dead man was remains something of
a mystery, and I'm like scattered around the that part
we know, or we'd presume. Uh. And in the years
between the time that the skull had been picked up

(08:21):
and when Missoo Hastings had killed the Red ghosts uh
And there had been other sightings during that time. But
there had also been a lot of speculation that perhaps
the corpse had been a man who had strapped himself
onto the camel when he was thirsty and near death,
hoping that the animal was going to eventually lead him
to water. It didn't work. Apparently, well they've realized that

(08:45):
wasn't really what happened. Well, once the felled camel and
its straps had been examined, though, it was apparent that
they could not have been tied by a man, the
man who was riding, and this conclusion led the Mohabi
County Minor to say this, the only question is whether
the man was tied on for revenge or merely as
an ugly piece of humor by someone who had a

(09:05):
camel and a corpse for which he had no use. Yeah,
so there's it's never really been uh solved one way
the other in addition to who it was, but whether
he had been alive or dead when he had been
strapped to the camel. So the mystery of the red
ghost was assolved at that point as it was ever
going to be. Uh. However, that leads us to the

(09:29):
next part of the episode, which is why a camel
was wandering around the American Southwest in the first place.
And before we get to that, we're gonna have a
word from our sponsor. So the introduction of camels into
the US was actually a military function, and it actually

(09:53):
took two decades from the time the first studies were
conducted about this idea to the actual introduction of camels
into the American Southwest. It i'll started in eighteen thirty
six when E. F. Miller Esquire conducted a camel study
and wrote a letter detailing his findings to the U
S Quartermaster Captain George H. Croftsman of Georgia, and UH

(10:16):
in the spring of eighteen forty three, so still some
years later U S Quartermaster General Thomas S. Jessup received
a letter from Crossman extolling the potential virtues of camels
as pack animals for use in military service. Crossman characterized
camels as imposing and being potentially intimidating to the horses
favored by Native Americans, so they felt that they would

(10:38):
have the upper hand in any dealings with natives. And
camels had also, you know, after all, been part of
various militaries throughout world history, and Crossman cited Miller's research
as a source of validation for all his assertions about
how great camels could be for the service. This is
because the discworld books didn't exist yet. We're not we

(11:02):
need to find a time machine and then handed off
to that they don't pull any punches about how terrible
camels can be to work with. Crossman also discussed using
camels in the army with the Quartermaster Henry Wayne, who
was very interested in the idea. And then in eighty eight,
so this is still all percolating along via years and
years and years, Henry Wayne went to the War Department

(11:25):
with this idea, and though that had already taken quite
some time. It was actually another six years before the
concept of introducing camels into military service in the US
took another significant step. That was in eighteen fifty four
when Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War, made a report
to the Senate for posing the introduction of camels into

(11:45):
army use. And in addition to the previous missives that
promoted the use of camels, Davis had also been influenced
by naval officer Edward Fitzgerald Beale. Bale had read the
writing of ever east our Hook, a French missionary who
penned a travel diary called Recollections of a Journey through Tartari,

(12:05):
Tivet and China during the years eighteen and eighteen forty six.
He was really taken with the accounts of camels in
this work, and he shared his very enthusiastic point of
view on the topic with anyone who would listen, including
Jefferson Davis. And the timing of this at this point
was good because of the increasing burden that the US

(12:28):
was facing in the Southwest at the time. So Davis's
idea really was met with some enthusiasm, and this was
because there was a growing need both for transportation of
troops as well as for moving heavy loads of supplies.
So this is you know, mid eighteen hundreds, when we
are slowly pushing out to the west and things are
being built, uh, and the ability of camels to survive

(12:48):
in conditions similar to those in the desert areas of
the Southwest started to make them look like a pretty
appealing solution to the problems. So in early eighteen fifty five,
Davis was granted a budget of any thousand dollars to
start working on a camel corps. He immediately sent Henry
Wayne to the eastern Mediterranean to find suitable camels to buy,

(13:09):
and Wayne was joined in this mission by Navy Lieutenant
David Dixon Porter, who was actually a relative of Beal.
And the two men did not make a direct route
through the Mediterranean to like camel country. They actually stopped
at many places along the way. UH. They stopped throughout Europe.
They interviewed camel experts and got their opinions. They talked
to zoologists, they visited with royals who owned camels as

(13:32):
part of their menageries. And they also made several stops
around the Mediterranean, like they visited Tunis. They visited Malta
and in some of these places they would purchase stock
if they found it suitable. Uh. They also, while they
were doing all this stuff, dropped off Wayne's son at
a French boarding school where the boys stayed for several years.
He did not finish the camel travel. While you're in France,

(13:56):
why don't you go to school for a while. On
February fifty six, Wayne and Porter started their journey back
to the US aboard the U. S. S. Supply and
they were traveling with thirty three camels. This was a
mix of Arabian Bactory and Tunis and Tulu camels, along
with five handlers. This group landed at Indian on the

(14:17):
Texas on May four, and that's where the camels were
offloaded from the U. S. S. Supply and then they
began marching uh to their destination which was Camp very
day and they got to Camp very day on August
that same year. In eighteen fifty seven, Porter made the
journey to the Eastern Mediterranean again, bringing back forty one
more camels. Also in eighteen fifty seven, Beal took one

(14:40):
of the camel handlers who was named Hadji Ali, who
you will also see him listed in historical references high Jolly,
because apparently Americans that could not quite manage his name
nicknamed him that to see my my expression of being
rather nonplus. Yeah, he didn't apparently seem terribly concerned with it. Um.

(15:02):
But they all went on a survey expedition which had
been ordered by President James Buchanan, and this team was
tasked with building a wagon road from Fort Defiance, New Mexico,
to the Colorado River. And they took twenty five camels
with them on this assignment so that they could test
out the beasts, and it turned out that the camels
did a really good job. Side note, this wagon trail

(15:25):
also marked the travel path that would eventually become the
legendary Root sixty Yeah, first found by camels. Yeah. My
my friends Nat and Carry drove the entire length of
that as a summer vacation last summer. I have friends
that moved out to Los Angeles last year and they
did a similar thing on the way. I think it's
an awesome fun thing you have road trip time, having

(15:47):
only witnessed other people doing it. Yeah, I'm kind of like,
let's get to the destination already, not be in the
car all day, but that's me. Uh. It turned out
that these camels could easily carry three hundred pounds and
they could travel for four miles an hour, which doesn't
sound terribly fast, but compared to other options, they did
quite well, especially considering their heavy cargo with very few stops,

(16:08):
so they could just kind of go all day long. Uh.
And they didn't really need to have provisions for their
meals carried along because they were able to grade on
the cedar and the creasote bush that were plentiful along
the route and which other pack animals could not eat. Uh.
And the camels were also able to outlast other pack
animals on difficult journeys, so in some cases when they
had brought other animals along, they would have to abandon

(16:30):
them because they could not hack the conditions, whereas the
camels could just keep going. That's terrible, it is. This
one's a little rough for the animal lover and me.
Henry Wayne in particular, really championed the camel's usefulness. According
to one story, after hearing remarks about the camels not
being impressive as pack animals, he had one of his
camels loaded with four hay bales, which totaled more than

(16:51):
a thousand pounds to just show off how strong it was. Yeah,
again the animal lover and me struggles with a little
bit of this story. Um like, that's kind abusive, but
uh so, initially, you know, at this point, the Camel
Corps looked like it was going to be a success
because they were doing very well in the desert conditions.
They could carry loads, they could outlast mules and horses

(17:12):
no problem. But of course that is not the whole story.
If you've ever ever seen a book with a camel
in it, or maybe just like seeing a picture of
a camel, you've ever seen a camel, you right, even
if it's been like a far away glimpse of a camel,
you can probably grasp that they have tempers. Yeah, I
mean that's what they're known for. When I think most people,

(17:33):
if they just do a quick like association and someone
says camel, you think, oh my goodness, they're gonna spit
and trample me. Yep, that has proved to be a problem.
They could be very difficult, and they sometimes completely disregarded
their handlers. They would growl at soldiers as they approached
with loads that they were going to like peck on them,
onto them. Oh and also camel smell pretty bad. Yeah. Uh,

(17:57):
and I'm sure they probably weren't getting washed very regularly.
I'm just imagining what effort it would take to wash
a camel at this point in history. Yeah, a lot.
It would take a lot of effort. Couldn't just pull
out a hose, no, I mean you, oh, natural probably buckets,
maybe storms, hope. Uh. And that smell is actually part

(18:21):
of the reason. Uh, it's attributed to part of the
reason why they spooked the horses. And as you recall,
this had been a selling point for the camel corps
when it came to the horses the Native Americans used.
But this was a huge problem when there were horses
that were being used by the same US troops that
were also employing the camels, and they had to deal

(18:42):
with this interspecies problem. So the horses were not delighted
by the camel's presence. They would get very scared. And
keep in mind, these are large animals, so when one
is angry and one is spooked, you can imagine how
difficult it is to sort of corral that and then
multiply that by the many that we're traveling together. That
could be deadly, deadly combination. UH. And it's probably understandable

(19:05):
that many of the soldiers openly complained about the situation. UH.
And even General David Twiggs, who commanded Texas and thus
was a very powerful man in the military, he made
it pretty clear that he would just rather have mules
and could we please not deal with these camels. So

(19:27):
as the Civil War mounted, Confederate troops took Camp fair
Day in February of eighteen sixty one. And so while
the camels had proven their usefulness, they still were not
a standard part of military operations. This was still considered
an experimental concept and they hadn't really been planned for
as part of the Confederate War effort. So the animals

(19:48):
then were, you know, there at Camp fair Day, and
they were used and sometimes abused, again a little difficult
for the animal lover UH, in a variety of sometimes
kind of odd ways. Some were used for just transporting
goods and freight, just like they had been prior to
eighteen sixty one. Some were used for entertainment rides, and

(20:08):
some were sent around to other bases. One was allegedly
pushed off a cliff by Confederate soldiers because they found
it bothersome and they didn't want to take care of it,
and some were just neglected or set loose. Yeah, I mean,
my heartbreaks at the thought of an animal being there
en off a cliff, or even just abandoned or neglected.
At the same time, just from the point of view

(20:30):
of like someone in that situation, I can imagine that
there is an element of I don't know what to
do with these things, and there is a herd of
them at this camp, uh, and they just didn't know
how to deal with them. We should also mention that
while being set loose in some cases may have seemed
like a kindness, we should note that these animals had
been bred in domestication. I mean, they were bred as stock.

(20:53):
They weren't like wild camels that have been contentamed, so
they had never been wild, and fending for themselves in
the brush, even though they were physiologically, you know, pretty
well suited to the environment, was likely a very stressful situation.
And additionally, when prospectors or cowhands would encounter these animals
that had been set free just wandering, they kind of

(21:15):
viewed them as target practice. So they were really treated
very poorly and inhumanly. Union troops took Camp Vere back
in eighteen sixty five, but reconstruction resulted in a diversion
of funds away from the camel corps. And as the
railroad system was built farther and farther west, you know,
the camels had been helping to run supplies for a

(21:36):
lot of the construction, the need for the camels just evaporated,
and in eighteen sixty six most of the remaining camels
when Camp Verty had been taken back were sold at
auction in New Orleans, Louisiana, and also in Benicia, California.
And these were sold at significant loss. Uh. Some were
purchased by circuses, carnivals or zoos. Some were likely sold

(21:59):
to be used meat. Some were purchased by like just
private people who were like, I have money, I'll buy
a camel, and then they often turned around and resold
them for a much higher rate. They were, in essence
camel flippers, thinking camel flippers. Yeah, so today there are
camel core reenactors who keep a small number of camels
for education purposes. There's a comedy film made about the

(22:22):
whole thing in the seventies, and there's even a children's
book about it. There's also a memorial to the camel
corps at the final resting site of the camel handler
Hoggil e in quartz Aite, Arizona, and it's kind of
a pyramid shaped a little memorial that stands there and
references both Hagil's work as well as just the camel

(22:42):
coret itself, because he stayed in the US even after
his need his work as a camel handler was done.
While the Red Ghost was felled in camel sightings continued
in Arizona, California, and Mexico well into the twentieth century.
Even in the nineteen these there were people who claimed
that there were still camels in Sonora and Baja California. Yeah,

(23:06):
completely random species introduced and were allegedly, you know, kind
of surviving in the desert for a long time, some
being very elderly, I'm sure, and others possibly having made
it and had their own little camel families. I am
going to say that I am relieved that it was
not more like the introduction of Kadzoo. I mean, can

(23:28):
you imagine if camels overran the Southwest the way rabbits
overran Australia. I thought about that as I was doing
this is like, I guess camels didn't do so well
in the whole propagating and and sort of you know,
a huge blow up of population, which is good. I
still feel very bad for the camels because I can't

(23:49):
get past that. Uh. And it's interesting you'll hear sometimes
or read when you're looking at research about this. Uh.
There are historians who like to theorize what would have
happened if we hadn't completely abandoned the camel core experiment,
because it did seem like it had some uh fairly
you know, positive aspects to it, even though the camels
tended to be grumpy and problematic. You know. Some like

(24:12):
to wonder what had happened if the Union Army had
incorporated them into regular service after they had taken back
camp ver day. And we'll never know, of course, but
we do know that they could survive on their own
in the desert for decades. Uh. So you know, on
the off chance you're in the Southwest and see a
random camel probably related to those, there haven't been sightings

(24:33):
in decades, so I would be shocked. But unless some ridiculous,
wealthy person purchased this one as a pet and then
sets it free because they're fool It's probably not going
to happen. But that is the camel core, and that's
one of those things that um because it involves so
many moving parts and names that are also connected to

(24:53):
other aspects of the Civil War. You know, it can
quickly blossom out into a very huge and long thing,
and we may eventually for other parts of this story
that kind of interlocked. But that's the scoop on why
there was a camel running around looking like a devil, uh,
killing people with a corpse. Yeah, and it kind of
explains when you think about that why that camel seemed

(25:16):
to be pretty aggressive towards humans. It had clearly been
treated badly. Someone had strapped a person to it and
send it off. It was carrying something around, uh that
was tied tightly enough to be cutting into its flesh,
so it probably was very grumpy, did not associate humans
with good things. Thank you so much for joining us

(25:40):
for this Saturday Classic. Since this is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete now so here's our current contact information.
We are at history Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,

(26:03):
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot
com