Indianola

Researching the ghost town of Indianola, once the second-busiest port (after Galveston) on the Texas coast, which figures in a book of Texana I’m writing, I found this good site. Then-Secretary of War Jeff Davis shipped his thirty-two experimental Egyptian camels through the port on Matagorda Bay in 1856. They proved relatively useless. Among other problems, their feet were too tender for the rocky West Texas soil. But some people still like to experiment with them.