Quartzsite, AZ is a small town of about 3,500 people on Interstate 10 near the Arizona California border. It’s what I call a truck stop town having three truck stops, three fast food joints and seven gas stations along its 2 mile long Main Street. That’s in keeping with the town’s history. It’s been a desert way stop on the way to California since the days of the stagecoach.
If you’re not in a hurry to fuel up and grab a burger you might notice the camels. Not live camels but camel statues and camels on signs. Even the sign announcing that you’re entering Quartzsite has 3 camels on it. It’s at that sign the story begins.
Is any of this going to be on the test?
You are becoming most professional, and as amusing and interesting as ever, especially to me, who had done some travelling out there, and also enjoy my history. (I forward them to Jacky, and she to Leigh). As I recall, there is not much of Route 66 left as it has been subsumed by later roads. How did you get on with Seth and Dondi?
‘Two years before the mast’, Dana, the rightly famous and very readable account of the voyage around Cape Horn to California published in 1840, so California, I think in this case San Francisco, was still Spanish. The Yankee ships went there for cattle hides, as there was no was of getting the whole beef back east, and would anchor up for months until their holds bulged. If you want a most bloody work of fiction, try Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’, set on the border just after the Mexican defeat, (so no authority), and with thousands of whites heading for the gold fields. Comanches not nice. I like the idea of Confederate camels, did they personally secede? I used to smoke cameo cigarettes, it proved that I was sophisticated since I had been to the States.
Camels succeeded much better in Australia, brought along with drivers, from Afghanistan. Highly successful, like yours, so many escaped that there are now large feral herds in the red centre and west. On a coach one very early morning, heading south to Uluru,
Having dozed off before dawn, the coach stopped and we all awoke, to be told that we would be halted some minutes whilst the camels crossed the highway. Most vehicles out there have bull bars, there is so much wildlife wandering about, I even hit a large kangaroo just south of Sydney.
Happy birthday for 7/2, 72 years of course! I get my jab tomorrow. There is a new term going around, ‘corvid Envy’ for those not inoculated. Amusing cartoon in the ‘Times’ last week, ‘Are there any side effects? Yes, smugness.’
Blow your candles out, Love, Robin.
Love the history! Thanks for sharing your journeys!
Your unbelievable all the history you know you keep the trip interesting now you found the camels next will be giraffe’s!!! Hey there guy let me be the first to wish you a Happy Birthday tomorrow ???