Frederick Law Olmsted has been on my mind recently, in part because while we’re spending a few days in New York, we’re staying on Fifth Avenue, opposite the southeastern corner of Central Park, unquestionably Olmsted’s best-known creation.

Olmsted (1822–1903) was for all intents and purposes the father of American landscape architecture. Before he gained fame for reshaping much of the nation’s urban and suburban landscape, however, he was an adventurous journalist whose 1857 book A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier is a classic of Texas travel literature. In the book, originally published in serial form in the New York Times, Olmsted recounts a trip he took with his brother John in 1853–54, traversing the Lone Star State from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande.

In A Journey Through Texas, as in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856) and A Journey in the Back Country (1861), Olmsted, a deeply committed abolitionist, attempted “to explain how slavery prolongs, in a young community [such as antebellum Texas], the evils which properly belong only to a frontier,” including “bad temper, recklessness, and lawlessness.” (And this was before Interstate 35 even existed!)

Olmsted was a great admirer of the German settlers of the Hill Country (who, he pointed out, managed to earn a respectable living without employing slave labor) and of their “private convictions of right, justice, and truth.” He repeatedly held their settlements—New Braunfels, Boerne, Sisterdale, and the like—up as examples of the sort of virtuous, prosperous, cultured communities that were possible where slavery did not exist.

For me, however, the best part of the book is Olmsted’s portrayal of Mr. Brown, the mule he and his brother bought in Natchitoches to carry their supplies. Mr. B., as Olmsted often referred to him, was “a stout, dun-colored, short-legged, cheerful son of a donkey, but himself very much a gentleman…. Though sometimes subjected to real neglect, and sometimes even to contemptuous expressions (for which, I trust, this, should it meet his eye, may be considered a cordial apology), he was never heard to give utterance to a complaint or vent to an oath. He traveled with us some two thousand rough miles, kept well up, in spite of the brevity of his legs, with the rest, never winced at any load we had the heart to put on him, came in fresh and active at the end, and, finally, sold for as much as we gave for him.”

Only once did Mr. Brown mutiny. As the party was preparing to cross Cibolo Creek, he suddenly gave “a snort of fat defiance” and raced off into the nearby scrub, attempting to scrape off the wicker hampers affixed to his sides. Olmsted noted admiringly that “a short-legged mule, when fully under way in a stampede, is ‘some pumpkins’ at going,” but they soon ran him down and brought him back under control, and Olmsted tied him to a tree with no supper as punishment. “When morning came, his ears and spirits were completely wilted, and he always carefully avoided the subject of his private Cibolo stampede—never afterwards offering the least symptom of insurrection.”

In another memorable passage, the party was crossing Chocolate Bayou when they unexpectedly encountered a dangerously muddy bottom. Olmsted and his brother managed, with some difficulty, to free their mounts and lead them to safety, abandoning poor Mr. B. to his own devices. “Looking back, to learn the fate of the mule, we beheld one of the most painfully ludicrous sights I have ever seen. Nothing whatever was visible of Mr. Brown, save the horns of the pack-saddle and his own well-known ears, rising piteously above the treacherous waves. He had exhausted his whole energy in efforts that only served to drag him deeper under, and seeing himself deserted, in the midst of the waters, by all his comrades, he gave up with a loud sigh, and laid upon his side to die, hoisting only his ears as a last signal of distress.”

Fortunately Mr. B. rallied his spirits for one last effort and succeeded in freeing himself and wading to safety, “dripping like a drowned rat.” The wicker baskets he carried were, of course, not waterproof; “the hampers had become two barrels of water, which, added to our ridicule, the mule, his excitement over, found more than he could bear, and, sitting down, he gave us a beseeching look, as if ready to burst into a torrent of tears.” Mr. Brown was clearly a sensitive soul, and I’m a little surprised that Olmsted could bear to part with him at the end of his journey.

While I have had no personal experience with mules, my earliest encounter with a burro left deep psychological scars. When I was just a wee lad, no more than three or four, my parents, my grandmother, and I all crammed into my father’s Fiat 1100 and undertook a family trip from San Francisco to Mexico City. Somewhere in the Sonoran desert, we stopped at a dusty roadside establishment for gas, and my parents bought me a bottle of Coca-Cola—a rare treat indeed. Clutching my precious bottle of Coke, I wandered over to say hello to the poor little burro penned beside the gas station.

I was shocked when the creature came over, stuck his head through the slats of the fence, seized the bottle in his yellow teeth, and yanked it out of my hands. He tilted his head back and drained the contents in one long gulp, whereupon I burst into tears. My parents bought me another bottle of Coke, and the same thing happened! (Apparently I’ve always been a slow learner.)

After the tragic loss of the second bottle of Coke, my parents decided not to continue funding the burro’s drinking habit; perhaps they feared the effects of the rapid accumulation of so much carbonated beverage in his stomach. At any rate, they bundled me into the car—still screaming, no doubt—and headed down the highway.

As I grew older, I was as susceptible to the romantic myth of the cowboy as the next kid, but ever since that trip to Mexico I have generally distrusted all members of the genus Equus. Coke wasn’t introduced until 1886, but I like to think that, faced with the same temptation, the gentlemanly Mr. Brown would have exercised more self-control than his larcenous latter-day Sonoran cousin. But then I’ve always tended to idealize my literary heroes.

What we’re reading
Heather: Krista Tippett, Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit
Martin: George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (still!)

Susan Orlean’s wonderful story on mules in the military in this week’s issue of The New Yorker mentions one of my favorite, and most unlikely, episodes of Hill Country history: the U.S. Army’s Great Texas Camel Experiment of the 1850s.

Ultimately, the experiment was a failure; in Orlean’s words, “The camels were superior in terms of strength, but they were vicious, tended to cough up foul-smelling chunks of food, and made horrible groans and roars that terrified the horses.” Still, enough of the beasts went AWOL that for several decades unwary sojourners in the American Southwest occasionally found themselves face to face with a living, spitting embodiment of Oriental exoticism.

Before the Civil War, much of Texas was considered to be part of the “Great American Desert,” a vast area of the Southwest that was still largely uninhabited and considered unsuitable for agriculture. American expansionism was about to prove that characterization wrong, at least in the short term, though Timothy Egan’s terrific book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl vividly describes the horrific long-term result. But in the mid-nineteenth century, the War Department had to figure out a way to protect settlers and supply lines in this fearsome territory, and decided that using camels, instead of horses or mules, to carry troops and freight might be one way to do so.

The story of the Texas camel experiment actually begins in Florida, where Col. George H. Crosman apparently first thought about using camels for military purposes as far back as 1836. Crosman eventually asked Maj. Henry C. Wayne to look into the idea, and Wayne eventually reported to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis that the experiment would cost a mere $30,000. Congress duly authorized the expenditure in March 1855, and a little over a year later, on April 29, 1856, the naval storeship Supply arrived in Indianola, Texas, carrying thirty-three of the beasts (both one-hump Arabians and two-hump Bactrians), including one calf that had been born at sea, and three Arabs and two Turks whose job it would be to tend the creatures. The crossing had not been easy; the crew had to tie the camels to the deck during storms so they wouldn’t slide overboard, and the animals proved to be susceptible to seasickness.

On June 4, Wayne finally started his exotic caravan westward toward Camp Verde, south of Kerrville, pausing in Victoria to have the camels clipped. The industrious Mrs. Mary A. Shirkey of that town spun and knit a pair of camel hair socks as a gift for President Franklin Pierce, but Pierce reportedly found them so foul-smelling that he refused to wear them.

Wayne put the camels to work ferrying supplies between Camp Verde (a little over ten miles east of the future site of Madroño Ranch, as the crow flies) and San Antonio, with encouraging results. A second boatload of camels arrived in 1857, and some made the long trek to new quarters in California. An officer who led a caravan to the Big Bend country noted in his journal that the camels “performed most admirably,” adding that “No such march as this could be made with any security without them.”

Unfortunately, however, reports soon surfaced that the camels’ wide, soft feet, perfectly adapted for crossing desert sands in North Africa and the Near East, were not well suited to the rocky terrain of the the American Southwest. In addition, the soldiers were not fond of the camels, and vice versa; the officer who led the expedition to California noted that the beasts smelled bad and tended to bite or spit at the troops, and the horses and mules were unable to keep up with them.

Eventually, thanks in part to the complications brought on by the Civil War, the army decided to get out of the camel business. Some of the animals were sold to zoos, circuses, and mine operators. Others were simply turned loose to wander the Southwest; in 1885, the five-year-old Douglas MacArthur was terrified when he unexpectedly encountered one of the unlikely beasts near an army fort in New Mexico. Ten years later, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that “Many a passenger on the Southern Pacific railroad trains has had a sight of some gaunt, bony and decrepit old camel away off in the distance.” Today, the last of the original camels has long since disappeared, though a metal statue in front of the Camp Verde General Store commemorates their presence, and the Texas Camel Corps, a dedicated group of enthusiasts, keeps a number of the animals for pack trips, commercials, Christmas pageants, and the like.

Medina’s Early Days, one of the late Dorothy Hatfield Ferguson’s books of local history, includes the reminiscences of James Washington “Okra” Walker, who worked with the camels at Camp Verde. Walker was born in 1847, and in 1862, with the Civil War underway, decided to join the army and have a share in the fighting. Instead, much to his chagrin, the fifteen-year-old orphan found himself assigned to take care of the camels at Camp Verde. Looking back on the experience years later, Okra grudgingly admitted that the camels did have some advantages over other beasts of burden, principally “the ability to do without water for an incredibly long time,” but he never really warmed up to them, noting that “they weren’t as easy to look at as a good cuttin’ pony.” Moreover, they seemed much given to malingering, held grudges for any perceived mistreatment, and had the habit of spitting on those they didn’t like. “They also frightened the mules and horses and generally looked mighty out of place.”

When the experiment finally ended, Okra Walker, for one, was not sorry to see them go: “I guess I’d fooled with those beasts so long, and was [so] disgusted that I’d had to herd camels instead of fighting in the Civil War, that I never as much [as] asked one question pertaining to those camels or the buyer’s plans for them…. When those camels left Camp Verde, they went out of my life forever. I shouted after them, ‘Thank God you’re gone!’”

We have no plans to acquire camels for Madroño—I’m pretty sure Robert, our manager, would kill us if we did—but I like to imagine them roaming the ranch’s hills like the aoudads and other fugitive exotics we occasionally see today. And who knows? Perhaps the great-grandchild of some Arabian or Bactrian import is still out there, running free and gazing down at us with that inimitable camelicious mixture of disdain and amusement, sneering, “I’ll never be your beast of burden.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials trilogy
Martin: Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music