Hi Jolly’s Camels

Philipou Teodora sure didn’t fit the Wild West movie stereotype.  Born in 1828, his father was Syrian and his mother was a Greek captured by Arabs and taken to Smyrna, Turkey. As a young man he made a pilgrimage (a hadj) to Mecca and took the name Hadji Ali to show his dedication.  

But what does all that have to do with Arizona? As early as the 1830s, Lieutenant George Crosman and Major Henry C. Wayne recognized the camels’ ability to carry huge loads in the desert with very little water or food. On March 3, 1855, Congress approved $30,000 to purchase camels and hire drivers to test their use for supply transport in the American West.

Lieutenant David Dixon Porter, captain of the USS Supply was sent to the Middle East to purchase the camels. He hired camel saddle maker Mimico Teodora and his cousin Hadji Ali to provide camels for the a U.S. Army supply train experiment and Hadji Ali was also hired to return to the United States as a camel driver.

In the spring of 1857 Secretary of War John B. Floyd directed former U.S. Navy lieutenant and American spy Edward “Ned” Fitzgerald Beale to use twenty-five camels for wagon-road survey west along the thirty-fifth parallel from Fort Defiance near the current Arizona/New Mexico border to the Colorado River.

As soon as they stepped onto American sand the camel’s nasty tempers caused problems. Hadji Ali, nicknamed Hi Jolly by soldiers who couldn’t pronounce his name, was an experienced handler who could alternate between a soothing, cajoling “camel whisperer” and a no-nonsense disciplinarian. In his 1857 Beale expedition journal, 19-year-old May Humphreys Stacey wrote that one rampaging camel ran everyone else out of the camp but Hi Jolly “soon had him obedient by the liberal use of an axle tree.”

In 1859, Hi Jolly and another camel driver took up a contract to carry mail from Los Angeles to Flagstaff. For the next twenty-five years, Hi Jolly contracted with the U.S. Army as a mule packer, guide, and scout.

Hi Jolly married Gertrudis Serna in Tucson 1880 and fathered two girls, Amelia and Herminia. Soon after their birth Hi Jolly left his family and moved to Quartzsite, Arizona. He prospected there and captured some camels that had escaped into the desert, renting them out to local prospectors. Known as Philip Tedro in his later days, Hi Jolly died in his adobe casita in Quartzsite on December 16, 1902, at the age of 73. In 1934 James L. Edwards of the Arizona Highway Department had a pyramid erected over Hi Jolly’s gravesite. On the top rests a metal silhouette of a one-humped camel. Hi Jolly’s tomb is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.