California Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949
Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen
They are Los
Angeles’s history keepers. They research, organize, store, repair, and care for
historical artifacts and make them available to us online, at exhibitions,
through publications, or in their homes. This summer, from August 5 to August
27, the California Historical Society celebrates them with an exhibition at the
historic El Pueblo National Monument.
A series of
blogs brings our online visitors a sample of objects in the exhibition. Here we
explore a unique object that commemorated Los Angeles’s centennial featuring a
depiction of an unusual mode of transportation in the late nineteenth century.
California
Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949
History Keeper: Phyllis Hansen
California Centennial Transportation Plate (detail of back), 1949
Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen
In 1949, California celebrated
its centennial of statehood. Vernon Kilns, one of Los Angeles’s premier pottery
companies at that time, produced a series of themed commemorative plates for
the occasion. There were six in the series, all in brown on white.
The
plates were a creative collaboration between Mrs. Armitage S. C. Forbes—the
“Bell Lady” of El Camino Real and
“Mother of the Campo de Cahuenga”—and California artist/historian Orpha Klinker, who did the renderings.
“Wedding Party Arriving Home in Carreta,”
detail,
California Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949
Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen
The
transportation-themed plate depicts a wedding party on an oxen driven, wooden
wagon, also known as a carreta, an
early method of transport during the mission period. Surrounding this central
image are other depictions of historical modes of transportation unique to
Southern California. Perhaps the most unique of all the depictions are the
camels that arrived at the Drum Barracks in Wilmington in January 1858.
“Ship of the Desert”: The
U.S. Camel Experiment, 1856–1866
As a mode of transportation, few
would guess that camels in California would qualify. Yet, in 1857, due largely
to the efforts of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, 75 camels were imported
from Egypt to the United States as an experiment in serving the U.S. Army in
the Southwest. One group of camels was selected to pack supplies from Los
Angeles to Fort Tejon in California; others to transport military supplies to
forts in Utah, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico.
Gwynn H. Heap
(illustrator), Loading the Camels for
Transport to America, 1857
Published in Report of the Secretary of War, Communicating, in
Compliance with a Resolution of the Senate of February 2, 1857, Information Respecting
the Purchase of Camels for the Purposes of Military Transportation (Washington:
A. O. P. Nicholson, printer, 1857)
Courtesy
National Archives
“Camels Secured for a Gale, page 180 of Report of the Secretary of War (1857),” 1930
Published in A. A. Gray, Francis P. Farquhar, and William S. Lewis, Camels in Western America
(San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1930)
In January
1858, the first train of pack camels arrived in Los Angeles. Their task was to
carry supplies and provisions to Fort Tejon in the Tehachapi Mountains. As a 1902 historical record of Southern
California noted, “For a year or more afterwards it was no uncommon sight
to see a caravan of these hump-backed burden-bearers solemnly wending their way
single file through the city.”
Encampment with the Camels on the Descent towards Carson
Valley, c. 1860
Vischer’s Pictorial of California (View No. 47)
California Historical Society
Camel at Drum Barracks,
San Pedro, California, during the Civil War, c. 1863
Attributed to Rudolph D’Heureuse;
courtesy of the Drum Barracks Garrison & Society
“Camels arrived in California in 1858 at
Drum barracks, Wilmington, Calif.,” detail,
California Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949
Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen
The Camel Experiment ultimately failed. The camels’
eccentricities—unfamiliar and untrainable by its riders—and with their
incompatibility with horses confined them to the forts in the Southwest. The
onset of the Civil War led to the end of the Camel Corps, which disbanded in
1863.
In California, camels were brought to the military
reservation at Benicia, where they were lodged and later auctioned off. Today
the Camel Barns at the Arsenal house the Benicia Historical Museum. Still
others were turned loose, to roam at will over the region. As the writers of
the 1939 WPA Guide to California: The
Golden State observed:
Within recent years a camel frisked
about the neighborhood of Banning, making such a nuisance of himself that he
was hunted down by a posse and shot. This was undoubtedly an aged survivor of
the government caravans that cross the desert prior to the Civil War. . . .
Some wild camels were sighted on the desert as late as 1980, and even now
newcomers [to Banning] are solemnly assured they can expect to run into them at
any moment.
Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org
Sources
Jefferson
Davis, Reports upon the Purchase,
Importation, and Use of Camels and Dromedaries to Be Employed for Military
Purposes (Department of War, 1857)
Francis P.
Farquhar, “Camels in the Sketches of Edward Vischer,” California Historical Society Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Dec., 1930): 332–35
Federal Writers’ Project, The WPA Guide to Los Angeles: The Golden
State (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2013)
Walter L. Fleming, “Jefferson Davis’s Camel Experiment,” Popular Science Monthly, 174
(Feb. 1909): 141–52.
A.A. Gray,
“Camels in California,” Quarterly of the California Historical Society IX, no.
4 (December 1930): 229–317
J. M. Guinn, “Camel Caravans of the American Deserts,” Publications of the Historical Society of
Southern California and of the Pioneers of Los Angeles County, 5 (1900–1902): 146–51
James Miller Guinn, Historical
and Biographical Record of Southern California
(Chicago; Chapman Publishing company, 1902)
______________________________________________________________________________
An exhibition by the California Historical
Society and LA as Subject
Presented in
partnership with El Pueblo Historical Monument and the El
Pueblo Park Association
El Tranquilo
Gallery & Visitor Center
634 N. Main
Street (entrance on Olvera Street, W-19)
El Pueblo de
Los Ángeles Historical Monument,
Los Angeles, California
Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 am–3:00 pm
Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm
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