CamelTraining.com

[Onezebra]

People often ask, can camels swim, can they stand the cold, how do their feet hold up going over rocks, how fast do they travel, and how much weight can they pack? Read the information below and learn some interesting things about them.

I have been reading an interesting book published in 1929 called Uncle Sam’s Camels. It the journal of May Humphreys Stacey supplemented by the report of Edward Fitzgerald Beale.

They are the ones that took the army camels from Texas to California in 1857. The camels were packed with an average of 700 pounds each; the largest carried nearly 1,000 pounds each.

In his journal entry of July 11, Beale speaks of the remarkable endurance of the camels on the road, a road strewn with a fine sharp, angular flinty gravel. “The camel has no shuffle in his gait, but lifts his feet perpendicularly from the ground, and replaces them, without sliding, as a horse or other quadrupeds do. This, together with the coarsely granulated and yielding nature of his foot, which, thought very tough, like gutta percha, yields sufficiently without wearing off, enables them to travel continuously in a country where no other barefooted beast would last a week”

Speaking of the camels at this stage of the journey Beale says: “the camels are so quite and give so little trouble that sometimes we forget they are with us. Certainly there never was anything so patient and enduring and so little troublesome as this noble animal. They pack their load of corn, of which they never taste a grain; put up with any good food offered them without complaint, and are always up with the wagons, and, withal, so perfectly docile and quite that they are admiration of the whole camp.
…They are better today than they were when we left Camp Verde with them; especially since our men have learned, by experience, the best mode of packing them.” Beale Report, 44

August 20. This morning I mounted the white dromedary, “Seid,” and started back to meet Colonel Loring. The morning was cool and pleasant, and the fine animal traveled off at the fast rate of eight miles an hour without, apparently, the least effort.
On reaching Covero, some thirteen miles and a half from camp, I found the colonel, who had just arrived, and after a pleasant interview, we started back together; but finding his animals unequal to mine, I rode on to camp again alone, and arrived after an absence of three hours, during which I had ridden twenty-seven miles. “Seid” seemed not the least tired; indeed, it was as much as I could do to hold him on my return, and could not have done so had I not put the chain part of his halter around his lower jaw. The best mule or horse in our camp, in present condition, could not have performed the same journey in twice the time, although they have been fed with corn ever since leaving, and some of the horses not worked at all, having been kept for express duty in the event of accident, while “Seid” has not only worked every day, but been grazed entirely on grass.

Apache Mountains. Beal records here: “The camels arrived nearly as soon as we did. It is a subject of constant surprise and remark to all of us, how their feet can possible stand the character of the road we have been traveling over for the last ten days. It is certainly the hardest road on the feet of barefooted animals I have ever known. As for food, they live on anything, and thrive. Yesterday they drank water for the first time in twenty-six hours, and although the day had been excessively hot they seemed to care little for it. Mark the difference between them and the mules; the same time, in such weather, without water, would set the latter wild, and render them useless, if not entirely break them down.” Beale Report, 25.

One of the difficulties anticipated by Lieutenant Beale in crossing the Colorado River was due to the fact that he had been told that camels could not swim. At the river’s edge the first camel refused to take to the water. Anxious, but not discouraged, Beal ordered the largest and finest animal brought to the river. The camel took to the water and swam “boldly across the rapidly flowing river. We then tied them, each one to the saddle of another, and without the slightest difficulty, in a short time swam all to the opposite side in gangs, five in a gang; to my delight, they not only swam with ease, but with apparently more strength than horses or mules. One of them, heading up stream, swam a considerable distance against the current, and all landed in safety on the other side.”
Ten mules and two horses died crossing the river.

After his arrival to the Tejon Ranch in California, Beale placed a group of the camels in a camp high up in the mountains on his estate in order to test the ability of the animals to withstand cold. There the camels lived “in two of three feet of snow, fattening and thriving wonderfully all the while.” During a sever snowstorm a wagon loaded with provisions for the camp was stalled in the snow. Several camels were sent to the rescue and brought the load through the snow and ice to the camp, and this in spite of the fact that six strong mules had been unable to extricate the heavily loaded wagon. Beale Report, 77.