Camp Verde, a frontier army post on Verde Creek in southern Kerr County, was the home base of the United States Army's camel experiment. Congress set aside $30,000 in March 1855 at the urging of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, and Maj. Henry C. Wayne sailed on the naval storeship Supply to buy the animals. He came back with 33 camels, and 32 of them, plus a calf born at sea, were landed at Indianola in the spring of 1856. They walked inland by way of Victoria and San Antonio and reached Camp Verde in late August 1856. A second shipment of 41 followed. At the post the army built a khan, a walled camel corral, with walls about 150 feet long and 10 feet high and huts for the camel drivers along the back. Wayne reported camels carrying loads of 600 pounds, going long distances without water and browsing on nearly anything, and one expedition took them into the then-unexplored Big Bend country. In 1857 Edward Fitzgerald Beale led 25 of them on a wagon-road survey along the 35th parallel to California. Confederate troops took the post in February 1861 along with 80 camels, some of which packed cotton bales to Brownsville. The government auctioned the herd in 1866, and Bethel Coopwood bought 66. The tests had gone well; the camels failed because their smell frightened horses and soldiers preferred mules. The army abandoned Camp Verde on April 1, 1869. What remains of the post stands on private land.
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29.8905, -99.1204
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