BACK STORY - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 20

ocean voyages and their subsequent treks to army posts throughout the southwest.
The officers who used them on missions were, on the whole, favorably impressed,
while the muleteers who took care of them tended to hold them in more measured
esteem.
But these discordant evaluations did not explain the ultimate failure of the
experiment. With the outbreak of the Civil War, responsibility for the camels,
whose numbers had grown somewhat through natural increase, passed to the
Confederacy. Even their early advocate Jefferson Davis had other priorities at that
point. Some of the camels were sold to circuses, menageries, and zoos; others were
simply allowed to wander away into the wild dry lands. They were sighted (and
chased and hunted) with decreasing frequency during the post-war decades
(Perrine, 1925). In 1901, a journalist who considered the whole episode to be 'one
of the comedies that may once in a while be found in even the dullest and most
ponderous volumes of public records from the Government Printing Office'
reported that 'now and then a passenger on the Southern Pacific Railroad . . . has
had a sight of some gaunt, bony and decrepit old camel . . . grown white with age,
[and] become as wild and intractable as any mustang' (Griswold, 1901: 218-219).
Of course, the details of the assimilation or attempted assimilation—how many
individuals were involved, whether they were wild or domesticated, where they
went and where they came from, whether the enterprise succeeded or failed—
made a great difference to the imported creatures as well as to the importers. Such
attempts, often termed 'acclimatization', became relatively frequent during the
nineteenth century, though the simple desire to acclimatize was the reverse of
novel. Whether so labeled or not, acclimatization has been a frequent corollary of
domestication, as useful plants and animals have followed human routes of trade
and migration; it thus dates from the earliest development of agriculture, 10,000
years and more ago. Indeed, much of the history of the world, at least from the
perspective of environmental history, can be understood in terms of the dispersal
and acclimatization of livestock and crops.
Historically and prehistorically, people have taken animals and plants along with
them in order to re-establish their pastoral or agricultural way of life in a new setting.
Thus the bones of domesticated animals (and the seeds and other remains of
domesticated plants) can help archaeologists trace, for example, the spread of
Neolithic agriculture from the various centers where it originated. (The agricultural
complex that was ultimately transferred throughout the temperate world by
European colonizers in the post-Columbian period, based on cattle, sheep, and
goats, along with wheat, barley, peas, and lentils, was derived ultimately from the
ancient farmers of the eastern Mediterranean.) Even the remains of less apparently
useful (or at any rate, less edible) domesticated animals can signal human migration
patterns. For example, the prevalence of orange cats in parts of northwestern Europe
indicates long ago Viking settlement, and the relative frequency (greater than further
south and decreasing toward the Pacific) of robust polydactyl cats (a mutation that
apparently arose in colonial Boston) along the northern range of American states
indicates the westward movement of New Englanders (Todd, 1977: 100-107).