CAMELS IN AZ

When we were in Egypt in 1978, someone there asked me if we had camels in America. He seemed surprised that we had no camels in our deserts. I didn't live in the desert then. I lived in California. Now I live in the desert, and found out that at one time there were camels in our deserts. There was an article about it in our newspaper a few days ago.

After I started writing this post, I remembered posting about camels about a year ago. In that post I had a lot of pictures and info about these interesting creatures. Should you be so inclined, you can click HERE to go to that post and find out more about camels.

Now, back to the article in our newspaper. It starts out by saying if it wasn't for the civil war there might be herds of wild camels roaming our deserts. Thirty-three camels were bought from the middle east and shipped to America. They eventually ended up in Texas. Then they imported 44 more camels. When they discovered the camels didn't understand English, they hired two camel drivers from the middle east to teach them how to handle the animals. The camels were used by the army for awhile transporting supplies. The camels impressed them so much that they decided to order 1000 more but that was about the time the civil war broke out. This spelled the end of the Camel Military Corps as soldiers were sent to the east to fight the battle. Eventually some of the camels were sold and some escaped into the wild. The camels thrived for awhile but eventually died out. The last one was shot in Arizona in 1893 by a farmer who found him grazing in his garden. For a full reading of that newspaper article, you can click HERE. I am just posting a recap of the article.

I've posted this picture of me on a camel in Egypt before, but decided to share it again here. It was an interesting experience to say the least. It really scared me when the camel driver made the camel take off in a run toward the pyramids. Seeing all those pictures of Cairo on the news for the past two weeks brought back memories of when we were there. We were there before Mubarak took over. It was over 30 years ago. Wouldn't want to be there right now. We all need to be praying about the future of that country. Nobody knows for sure how it will all end.