A buyer was dispatched and sent to the Middle East where he purchased 33 of them and proceeded to load them on a ship that had been modified for them and set sail to Indianola, Texas. Authorities were also sent there to find men who spoke camel....*snicker*!
Hadji Ali and Yiorgos Caralambo (AKA Greek George) were hired to teach the soldiers how to deal with these camels. Since the soldiers couldn't pronounce Hadji's name, he became known as Hi Jolly!
The camels were a great success! They could carry two to three times as much as the Army mules. They could go without water for much longer than could their horses or mules and most of the desert forage was fine for them to eat.
But alas, along came the Civil War and Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy as we all know. So without his support, the project was abandoned. Some of the camels were sold and 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 the next two years.
In 1880 he became a U.S. citizen and started calling himself Philip Tedro and married Gertrude Serna of Tucson, AZ. 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 1930's and 1940's 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!
This one picture of the pyramid with a camel on top is located in the Hi Jolly Cemetery and the cemetery is the most visited locations in Quartzsite!!
The other picture you can spot at the town boundary lines, on all 4 sides! I think the statues, etc. are a nice way to honor Hi Jolly and his camels.
Isn't that a neat story?!
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