Arizona’s adventure with camels began in 1855 when Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War and later President of the Confederacy, was sold on the idea of importing camels to build and travel on a wagon road through the Southwest.

 

A buyer was dispatched to the Middle East where he bought 33 camels, then loaded them on a ship modified to accommodate their bulk and sailed to Indianola, Texas. Another batch of 44 of the beasts followed. Authorities sent to the Middle East for men who spoke camel, and that’s where Hadji Ali comes into the story. The famed camel driver was born Philip Tedro, a Greek born in Syria. He converted to Islam and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, hence his first name, Hadji Ali.

 

He and another camel driver, Yiorgos Caralambo (who came to be called Greek George) were hired to teach the soldiers how to deal with the animals. Soldiers couldn’t pronounce Hadji Ali, and he became known as Hi Jolly. The camels were a great success. They could carry two or three times as much as Army mules. They could go without water for much longer than could horses or mules, and most of the desert forage was fine with them.

 

But the Civil War intervened, Jefferson Davis changed jobs, and without his support the project was abandoned. Some of the camels were sold; others escaped into the wild. Hi Jolly bought two of them and operated a freight route between the Colorado River and the mining towns of eastern Arizona for two years.

 

In 1880, he became a U.S. citizen, started calling himself Philip Tedro and married Gertrudis Serna of Tucson.  When he retired, he moved to Quartzsite and prospected around the region using a mule. He died in 1902.  The camels thrived for a while, but eventually died out. However, as late as the 1930s and 1940s there were unsubstantiated reports of camels spotted in the wild. One story was that of the Red Camel, which roamed the desert with a headless human skeleton on its back. 

  

The monument was placed on the national register in 2011. Entrance to Hi Jolly Monument is off N. Kofa, 1 block north of West Main Street, Quartzsite, Arizona.

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Learn more at www.QuartzsiteAz.org