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Thursday, December 31, 1998

Thursday, December 31, 1998

Movie revives forgotten part of Texas history

By RENAE MERLE

Associated Press Writer

BASTROP, Texas (AP) -- This may be Chewbacca's first movie, but the 2,000-pound, 7 1/2-foot-tall camel has nailed artistic temperament. After just two hours "of standing there and looking cute," he needed a four-hour break.

Doug Baum, one of Texas' last camel wranglers, watched Chewbacca and his five camel co-stars with affection, but without sympathy.

"They're a bunch of pampered babies," he said.

Nothing like the camels Chewbacca and his four-legged colleagues are portraying in "The Texas Funeral," a movie starring Martin Sheen that has been shot in and around Austin for the last three months.

In the movie, which spotlights the little-known role of the camel in state and national history, Chewbacca plays Robert E., a descendant of the U.S. Camel Corps that helped explore the trails to the West before the Civil War.

"This is a much-neglected part of Texas history," said Baum, who followed his father into the profession.

The corps, according to many historical reports, began in the 1850s as the brainchild of U.S. Sen. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who hoped to follow the Arab tradition of using the camels to cross long deserts.

"He was always looking for new and better ways of doing things," said Keith Hardison, executive director of Beauvoir, The Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library in Biloxi, Miss.

It wasn't until Davis became secretary of war in 1855 that Congress appropriated $30,000 for the purpose of training soldiers to use camels for carrying supplies the way they would use mules and for exploring new territories between El Paso and the Colorado River.

But first he endured the ridicule and snickers of colleagues.

"People even complained that the camels wouldn't understand English. I never really understood that one," Hardison said.

The U.S. Army sent an expedition to Northern Africa and after many bribes and negotiations had 33 camels. By April 1856, when they landed at the port of Indianola, (near what is now Galveston), the humpback fleet had grown to 34.

After several weeks of rest, the camels arrived at Camp Verde, 60 miles west of San Antonio, which became their permanent base during a career cut short by the soldiers' reluctance to work with them and the impending Civil War.

"It would have been a good program if the war hadn't killed it," said Texas folklorist Elmer Kelton of San Angelo.

The war distracted the country, and the corps seemed to be forgotten.

That was OK with the soldiers, who complained that the animals held grudges, waiting for weeks to exact revenge for some offense by kicking or spitting on them.

Much worse, some complained, was their odor, which even bothered the mules.

The herd eventually was auctioned, and many of the animals were set free. Wild camels were spotted from South Texas to Arizona for some years.

But that wasn't really the end of the corps, according to Blake Herron, who as director of "The Texas Funeral" has a personal connection to the story: His great-great-great-great grandfather, Bethel Coopwood, may have been Texas' first camel thief.

"Bethel was a spy for the South and historical or loose historical fact is that he came upon a northern contingent who were using camels for supply trains to Texas," Herron said.

"And there seems to be a lot of evidence that Bethel just killed the lot of them (the northerners) and took the camels for his own purposes."

Those purposes included creating his own camel cavalry -- like a pony express without the ponies -- to transport goods.

"At one point I think he had 40 of them, but they slowly died off and they were gone by the time I was born," Herron of the camels' descendants.

Herron weaves that family folklore into his latest production, which is due out next year.

It centers on the 1968 return of family members to their rural Texas homestead to attend the funeral of family patriarch Grandpa Sparta, played by Sheen. There is some upheaval when Grandpa Sparta's beloved camel, Robert E., becomes depressed.

While nursing the heartsick animal, the youngest member of the family is visited by Grandpa Sparta's ghost and taken on a journey where he meets his ancestors and learns the family legends -- all of which include camels.

Herron said his experience with the camels on the set hearkened to the complaints of frontier days.

"You get these biblical miracles of performance out of the camels sometimes," Herron said. "They react. Sometimes they're acting with the actors, and I think the audience is going to be thrilled with that."

But that's not always the case.

"They get cranky if you work too long," he said. "They're not malicious, they don't attack people, per se, but they are big and they do move where they want to go."

And then there's that other problem.

"They spit the vilest green substance," he said. "You can smell their breath from across the room."

(See photo)