The camels receded into folklore, and although there are many stories about them after they were no longer used, these stories are difficult to verify. Some transportation lines purchased the army surplus and tried to make profitable use of camels, but even that experiment - like the army one before - ultimate failed.

Following is an excerpt on a book manuscript (completely unedited!!!), that I am preparing for submission this month:

Modern tradition also reconsidered animals of the past by giving camels a new role in the folklore of the region. Majestic “ships of the desert,” camels were used experimentally in some parts of the West to haul supplies from salt mines to centers of milling. Those who imported the beasts thought that they would be perfect for the environment, but as it turned out, they did not adapt as well as hoped. Camels could not cross terrain with sharp rocks, and they frightened horses. In 1875, the Nevada legislature passed a law prohibiting camels on public highways, and Virginia City had an ordinance restricting camels in town to after dark. Eventually, camels fell out of use, and for decades, stories circulated about sightings of the abandoned animals wandering in the Nevada desert.

The role of camels in local folklore blossomed fully in a twentieth-century rebirth of the hoax. Beebe and Clegg, in their effort to resuscitate Comstock institutions and to bring the mining district back to its glory days, reestablished the Territorial Enterprise. They were able to transform the abandoned institution into an impressive, nationally recognized weekly publication, often featuring acclaimed writers. To give the Enterprise its full texture from the previous century, the new editors tried their hand at the journalistic hoax. In the summer of 1959, they published results of the first annual camel races.

The famed hoaxes of De Quille and Twain required a degree of sorting out by both local readers and those in California. In this case, the residents of the Comstock would immediately understand that this story was false because they would know that there had not been a camel race in Virginia City. What is more, locals would have understood that Beebe and Clegg were celebrating the institution of the hoax. Many, no doubt, would have been delighted when other newspapers picked up the story, republishing the results of the race as fact.

Of course, the joke backfired the following year when famed film director John Huston told the people of Virginia City that he wished to ride one of the beasts in the second annual camel race. He was in the area directing the film, The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. Huston, being an adventuresome thrill seeker, would not miss the opportunity to race a camel. What had begun as a nod to historical camels combined with the celebration of a hoax transformed into a real event.

And this on ghosts of camels:

Among the various ghostly remnants of the past, there are even reports of apparitions of camels. As described in the previous chapter, these exotic beasts of burden were a rare but renowned fixture of nineteen-century Nevada, and they gained a place with the Comstock's celebration of its past beginning in the 1960s. It is perhaps fitting that there should also be stories of a ghost camel that can be seen, climbing, "over the top of Mt. Davidson on certain nights when a full moon is high in the sky," as Oberding describes, adding that occasionally, "riding the beast is a grinning skeleton." This was described earlier, in 1983, in what was likely the source: Douglas McDonald, who wrote of the camels that, "Eventually they all perished, either from the elements or predators, until all that remain are the legends. A large red camel supposedly jaunts the steep slopes of Sun Mountain above Virginia City and is only visible on nights of a full moon. Another legend has a ghost camel train roaming the various Nevada salt flats with a skeleton lashed to one of the animals."

A hint of an earlier tradition of ghostly camels is preserved in testimony collected from native Comstocker Ty Cobb, but details are lacking. Here then is the persistent problem identified earlier, namely the issue of sorting out documentation of recent ghost stories. The genre perhaps more than others attracts a great deal of popularized, written treatments, intended for readers who likely believe in ghosts and want to be titillated by these accounts, but that can come up short as evidence of folklore.

Often, authors including Janice Oberding have recorded a story that they have been told, but at other times, the origin of a narrative is unclear. Her publication of the two motifs related to ghost camels – the red camel of Mount Davidson and the camel ridden by a skeleton – are presented without source. Unless one stumbles upon these same accounts in sometimes obscure sources – in this case the self-published booklet offered by Douglas McDonald – speculation about the origin of the stories can be removed from verifiable history. Even then, it is difficult to say how Oberding came by these two stories, since there may be an unidentified intermediary source, or she may have heard them from someone repeating the McDonald text. Popularized publications about modern ghosts are problematic in this way even as they are invaluable for what they disclose about current belief and story.