The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, involved 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory, which would eventually make up all or part of the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Much of this terrain was extremely dry, desert landscape alien to the European-Americans who hugged the temperate East. The only desert most Americans knew about was in the Bible. Which seems to be where the camels, the ships of the desert, came in. Biblical deserts equaled camels. So why shouldn’t American desert equal the same thing? Scholar Vince Hawkins details the ups and downs of the U.S. Army’s “Camel Corps” experiment of the mid-1850s.