30 



THE USES OF THE CAMEL. 



celerity of his movements ; his extraordinary fearlessness ; the 

 safety of his rider, whether from falls or the viciousness of the 

 animal ; the economical value of his flesh, and the applicability 

 of his hair and skin to man 3^ purposes of military use or con- 

 venience ; the resources which in extreme cases the milk might 

 furnish, and, finally, his great powers of abstinence from both 

 food and drink." 



Adaptability to our Far West. 



It would be idle now to speculate as to what would have 

 been the effect on our civilization, if Columbus, when he sailed 

 from Cadiz for Santo Domingo, on the 25th of September, 1493, 

 on his second voyage of exploration, taking with him horses, 

 cattle, and other domestic animals wherewith to stock the 

 New World, had taken some camels also. With the increased 

 facilities they would have afforded us for a larger development, 

 might we not have become more of a pastoral people — less 

 selfish and greedy of gain, taking more liberal and comprehen- 

 sive views of human affairs ? Might not our country have been 

 more fully explored, and to an extent settled, and farther ad- 

 vanced towards its sublime destiny ? And what would have 

 been the effect on the Indian question ? Should we have used 

 the camel exclusively to hunt that stricken and decaying people 

 more swiftly to their death ; or would he have been, on the other 

 hand, a civilizing element in their midst, winning them by his 

 morale to more useful and tranquillizing pursuits, a means of 

 utilizing rather than exterminating them ? 



All the local conditions and influences of our Western coun- 

 try indicate most unmistakably the camel as its appropriate 

 denizen. Take a map of the world on the Mercator projection, 

 and you will see that the parallels on which he is used to the 

 greatest extent, and to the best advantage in the Old World, 

 are precisely those on which we propose to employ him in the 

 New. The great geological, climatic, and topographical features 

 of the eastern and western parallels are sufiiciently similar. 

 Both on the Great Plains which form the eastern slope of the 

 Kocky Mountains, embracing nearly the entire valley of the 

 Kio Grande, and extending northward beyond the northern 

 boundary of the United States, and in the Great Basin of the 

 interior, between the Rocky s and the Sierra Nevada, there are 



