This year marks the centennial celebration of Route 66.
A recent AAA nationwide survey shows that more than a third of adults are planning road trips to visit the Main Street of America. Arizona's 385-mile stretch of the Mother Road, which begins in Lupton on the Navajo Nation and ends in Topock near the Colorado River, has odd origins.
Long before all the neon, diners, gas stations and motels dotted this humming highway, the U.S. Army first charted a course along the modern-day path of Route 66, surveying Arizona's high desert terrain for a wagon trail — with unlikely companions.
'You're not going to throw up on me?'
Those companions?
Camels.
Just like one I recently met named Crockett, who was being handled by Freddie Andrea at the Phoenix Zoo. He and his crew guide riders, myself included, atop the single hump of these dromedary camels — like Isaac, Romeo and Elvis — around the sandy zoo enclosure as the city's iconic Camelback Mountain sits in the hazy distance.
"What they do is they throw their cud up on you," Andrea shared. "So it's not like you see in the cartoons where they spit a little bit and they're accurate with it up to 20 feet. But these guys, you'd have to make them mad or scare them, and they would throw up on you."
"Isn't that right, buddy, you're not going to throw up on me?"
Camels can live up to 50 years.
In his prime, the 23-year-old Crockett could've carried up to nearly half a ton on his sturdy back. As Andrea walked the middle-aged camel with a bridle in hand, he warned that "once in a while, they'll step on our foot," insisting "it doesn't hurt like a pony or horse would, but it's still a lot of weight."
The Phoenix Zoo will give up to 75,000 of these short camel rides annually.
"Now this one, when we saddle Crockett, the last couple days, he's made sounds, so maybe he'll go," added Andrea, trying to mimic the mammal's grumbling noise. "They sound a little bit like when a lion growls, you know, under his breath, kind of, or maybe a little bit like Chewbacca."
'They were dead serious about making this work'
Nearly two centuries ago, in the 1850s, close to a dozen Middle Eastern cameleers helped ex-naval officer-turned-explorer Edward Fitzgerald Beale lead a caravan of camels through the arid American Southwest.
Among them was Syrian Hadji Ali, who locals affectionately called Hi Jolly.
Originally from the modern-day Turkish city of Izmir, Ali bred and trained camels in Algeria — until the U.S. Army enlisted his skills as a camel driver. He helped guide Beale during his 1857 expedition across the 35th parallel.
![Syrian cameleer Hadji Ali [right] and his wife, Gertrudis Serna.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/51ff09b/2147483647/strip/true/crop/911x1139+0+0/resize/840x1050!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fe6%2F59%2F606e52b246d4bb1435892d56c9dc%2Fhajdi-ali-wedding-az-memory-project.jpg)
Ali eventually resettled in the Arizona small town of Quartzsite, near the California border, where a pyramid-shaped memorial — made of stone and quartz topped with a steel camel silhouette — was erected to honor him at his final resting place.
His grave is even listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Future Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who at that time served as the U.S. secretary of war, was behind the idea to create a Camel Corps. In 1855, Davis even secured congressional money to fund this pre-Civil War experiment by importing more than 70 camels from northern Africa and the Ottoman Empire.
They all arrived in the Texas port of Indianola.
From there, a few dozen dromedary and bactrian — or double-humped — camels trekked the Lone Star State, through the New Mexico Territory to Fort Defiance, which now sits within Arizona as part of the sprawling Navajo Nation. Then, Beale continued west across modern-day northern Arizona, through the Mojave Desert, to the Colorado River and all the way to California.
Appointed by President James Buchanan, Beale's Arizona expedition lasted almost eight months, from June 1857 until February 1858. Congress spent $30,000 backing this wild adventure — about $1.1 million today when adjusting for inflation.
"I mean, they were serious," said Tucson native Natalie Koch, who is a political geographer at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. "They were dead serious about making this work. I don't want to say that this was just some crazy people that were disingenuous in their efforts."
She's also the author of "Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia."
Koch has traveled to the Middle East — Arab countries like Egypt, Morocco and Jordan — at least 30 times, riding camels along the way. Growing up in southern Arizona, Koch occasionally heard about her home state's unusual connection to this desert animal.
But it wasn't until a visit to the Gulf when she stumbled upon a television program in Qatar that convinced Koch to explore more, explaining, "If the Qataris are talking about this camel project and they're aware of the Arizona history, then there's something more to this that I need to dig into."
'This is a story of how Arizona was colonized'
"A lot of Arizonans just kind of write [it] off, but I was beginning to realize that none of this is just passive, idle curiosities," said Koch. "Like, this is a story of how Arizona was colonized. It's kind of cute, it's funny. There's a little pyramid with a camel on top. It seems innocuous, but that's the violence of the colonial project."
Nicknamed Mr. California, Beale served as the first superintendent of Indian Affairs for California and Nevada. He is credited with bringing initial gold samples from the West amid the mining rush in 1848.
The retired Navy lieutenant served in the Mexican American War and was later promoted to brigadier general during the Civil War. His decorated service career is also tethered to his fascination with camels.
"And so Beale sort of takes on this assignment and he became a true believer, like he really thought the camels were the greatest," said Koch, "and he wanted to make sure that this project succeeded."
Beale was surprisingly fond of them, especially compared to mules.
That affection was shown through many of his daily log writings in his official War Department report, reflecting on his trip. In one entry, Beale wrote "their perfect docility and patience under difficulties renders them invaluable, and my only regret at present is that I have not double the number."
Beale even went so far to say: "No one could do justice to their merits or value in expeditions of this kind, and I look forward to the day when every mail route across the continent will be conducted and worked altogether with this economical and noble brute."
"You can ride a horse off a cliff. I'd be willing to bet a great deal of money that you could never get a camel to go off a cliff," said Missouri-based camel ride manager Chester Taylor. "They're biologically similar to a cow — bovine — but they're intellectually more like a horse with 20 extra IQ points."
Almost three decades ago, Taylor began giving camel rides at the Baltimore Zoo; he's been around the animals ever since. Taylor owns Crockett and the rest of the camels at Phoenix Zoo. He's convinced this long-legged mammal could've become an enduring symbol of the West, like how the horse is seen today.
"It's definitely a better working animal," added Taylor. "It lives longer, it's stronger, it eats less, but the horses were afraid of them. And as cowboy Americans, they were not super into the Bedouins."
Bedouins were nomadic Arab tribesmen, who were hired by the U.S. Army to join this journey. Neither the horses nor Indigenous peoples would've previously encountered camels; it was something the military was even counting on.
"The camel always was a sort of military object for the American colonial project and taking over this territory that we now call Arizona," Koch said. "How do we scare off the Indigenous people who are resisting our taking over of their land and resources?"
From Navajos to Zunis, Beale met Indigenous peoples while trekking through Indian Country amid the U.S. Army's so-called "Indian Wars" era — seeing sights like the Little Colorado River and San Francisco Peaks.
In one instance, the travelers dealt with an Indian skirmish.
Beale used that confrontation to test the courage and mettle of the animals, shooting his revolver to scare them off. The horses and mules ran away — while the camels remained unfazed.
His writings also reflected a broader mindset of the nation's mission to settle the West and its original inhabitants. While he referred to some Natives as "peaceful," "quiet and inoffensive," Beale also called others "savages" and even "squaws" — a term that's now seen as a sexualized slur for women.
During one visit to a Zuni village, Beale wrote "the squaws are more expert at carrying things on their heads than our southern Negroes," adding, "I saw one ascend to the second story of a house by a ladder, with an earthen jar containing a full bucket of water, without touching it with her hands. lt was quite amusing to see the men knittin' stockings. Imagine Hiawatha at such undignified work."
Ultimately, Beale, in his own words, trotted some 4,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, "through a country for a great part entirely unknown, and inhabited by hostile Indians, without the loss of a man."
Despite Beale's hope, this American camel experiment was short-lived.
Amid the Civil War, then-Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered all of the animals to be auctioned off. A powerful mule lobby formed on Capitol Hill, tipping the scale in favor of ousting camels from the armed services.
Many animals found new homes in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Iowa, Texas and Nevada. As for Arizona, some camels famously helped construct the transcontinental railroad. When all that hard work was done, owners sold their camels to circuses or zoos, or simply let them loose.
That's also how the legend of the Red Ghost — a ghostly camel with a skeleton on its back roaming the Arizona frontier — emerged. Feral camel sightings were occasionally documented by local newspapers through the turn of the century.
A statute from Arizona's territory days even made it illegal to hunt camels; doing so would be considered a misdemeanor. That 1901 law is still on the books today, but the Arizona Game and Fish Department doesn't regulate the species since wild camels no longer wander the Sonoran Desert.
'It was travel routes for many of our tribes'
Ironically, Beale's wagon road became obsolete.
His camel-plotted blueprint paved the way for gas-powered automobiles driving Route 66 nearly seven decades later. That trail also laid the groundwork for the I-40 and Santa Fe transcontinental railroad. But long before Beale and his camels, this ancient corridor was already well-traveled by Indigenous peoples centuries prior.
That past is being celebrated today by Sherry Rupert, who is Paiute and Washoe from Nevada and CEO of the American Indigenous Tourism Association. She and her group designed an all-Indigenous guidebook along with the National Park Service Route 66 Corridor Program ahead of this year's centennial.
"Because prior to it becoming the Mother Road," said Rupert, "it was travel routes for many of our tribes to trade with each other along that very long stretch."
"Now you go through St. Louis
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty
You'll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona
Don't forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino."
No matter the era or recording artist, from Chuck Berry to Nat King Cole and the Rolling Stones, the famous lyrics of "Route 66" still map this winding way from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Today, more than half of the 2,448-mile-long interstate traverses Indian Country, including the reservations of over two dozen tribes from the Hualapai in Peach Springs to the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
"And those are going to be different than the pueblos of New Mexico that are a little little farther down," added Rupert. "Just because you visit one doesn't mean every other Indigenous destination is going to be the same. They're all sovereigns with their own language, cultures and traditions."
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