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  • Uncle Sam’s Camels: The Journal of May Humphreys Stacey Supplemented by the Report of Edward Fitzgerald Beal (1857–1858)
  • Paul H. Carlson
Uncle Sam’s Camels: The Journal of May Humphreys Stacey Supplemented by the Report of Edward Fitzgerald Beal (1857–1858). Edited by Lewis Burt Lesley. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 2006 [1929]. ISBN 0-87328-220-5. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 298. $24.95.

Since its first appearance in 1929, Uncle Sam's Camels has been reissued in various formats several times. Here is a 2006 facsimile reproduction of the old book but with a brief, but superb, explanatory foreword by Paul Andrew Hutton of the University of New Mexico. The Journal of nineteen-year-old May Humphreys Stacey and the report of Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale cover an 1857 expedition that took camels from San Antonio, Texas, to Los Angeles. Beale, who led the large expedition, was to survey a military wagon road from New Mexico to California along or near the 35th parallel and test the effectiveness of camels as pack animals in the Southwest. Stacey wrote daily from May 12 to October 21 in his journal, [End Page 222] which records the—well—the day-to-day events of the trip. The journal ends abruptly when Beale at the Colorado River assigned Stacey to go with others down the river to check its possibilities for steamboat operations. Stacey, while he returned to the expedition, did not resume his daily account.

The report of Lieutenant Beale is likewise a daily account of the expedition. It covers the period from 25 June 1857 to 21 February 1858, with a large gap between 18 October and 22 January. Beale writes less than Stacey about the camels, but he nonetheless held them in high esteem: "No one could do justice to their merits or value in expeditions of this kind" (p. 233).

The book is divided into five parts: an introduction, Stacey's journal, a brief account of the dispersion of the camels in the 1860s, Beale's report, and a bibliography. The editor, Lewis Burt Lesley, wrote the introduction and the piece on the dispersion of the camels, and he edits Stacey's journal but, as the book's title suggests, supplements it with notes from Beale's entry. Beale's report forms the appendix.

The "camel experiment," as it has been called, brought to America more than ninety animals. Officials landed the camels at Indianola on the Texas coast, and moved them through San Antonio to Camp Verde, an army post about sixty miles away. Here Beale and others tested and bred the animals before Beale led his expedition of some 25 camels, 35 or more men, a score of mules, 10 wagons, and 25 soldiers from San Antonio through Fort Defiance on the New Mexico–Arizona border to the Colorado River and eventually to Beale's ranch in southern California.

During the Civil War the army sold, gave away, or otherwise disposed of the camels, thus ending what in the twentieth century has become one of the great romantic tales of the Old West. Lesley's interesting book remains one of better works on the army's use of camels in the Southwest.

Paul H. Carlson
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, Texas
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