A Little History…

Camels once roamed the Southwest. That was, until the early twentieth century, when the last camel disappeared.

Following the Mexican-American War in 1848, the United States found itself in control of a vast new territory, what we today call the American Southwest. The discovery of gold in the California Sierra along with the ongoing sectional conflict over slavery placed the Southwest at the center of the increasingly vicious debate over the nation’s future.

Espousing America’s destiny to expand and conquer the continent, numerous men sought to tie the West to the East by developing a reliable transportation route. Among those people was Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who would become the president of the Confederacy a decade later.

A strong proponent of slavery and Manifest Destiny, as Secretary of War Davis advocated the opening of a southwestern transcontinental route from Texas into the gold fields of California. To do so, he came to support the idea of bringing camels from Northern Africa. He sent a military unit to the Mediterranean, where they purchased thirty-three camels before sailing back to Texas. The camels were then moved to Camp Verde, in the Arizona Territory, where they were boarded until 1861. In 1861, President Lincoln commissioned Edward Fitzgerald Beale to survey a viable route through the Southwest. Beale’s expedition included many of the camels brought from northern Africa and Turkey, and opened up the route from Texas to Los Angeles, the same one that Route 66 would later follow. The Civil War and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 brought an end to the use of the military’s use of camels. Many of the military’s stock was sold off to carnivals, released, or were simply shot as many of those who dealt with the animals despised the beast’s surly disposition and, well, unique odor.

Hija Ali…

Philip Tedro was one of less than a dozen Greeks who took part in the United States Army’s ill-fated experiment with the use of camels as dray animals in the American west. In the years just preceding the American Civil War these Greeks were involved not simply with driving and caring for the animals but also be-came much needed scouts for the United States Army. Yet it was after their participation in the Camel experiment that their real impact on the American southwest took place.

Hi Jolly was born Philip Tedro in Smyrna of half Greek and half Syrian parentage. Various sources report that Tedro was his ‘Greek name” and since he had converted to Islam and had made the pilgrim-age to Mecca he was also a Hadji. Hi Jolly’s membership in the Army’s Camel Experiment was not his first quasi-military adventure. Hi Jolly served with the French Army in Algiers before signing on as a camel driver for the US Army in 1856

After his service in the camel experiment Hi Jolly was to spend another 38 years in the American southwest. Tedro would divide his time between hauling freight (over roads he had helped to explore and establish), prospecting, and serving the United States cavalry as a scout. Hi Jolly first started a freighting business between various Colorado River ports and mining camps to the east immediately after the Expedition ended. Later, he changed routes and established a camel freight line between Yuma and Tucson. For various reasons, ultimately all of the old drovers’ business ventures failed.

The on again off again nature of Hi Jolly’s freight and drayage ventures were interspaced by work with the Army forts, just then, springing up after the Civil War. At various times and in various places Hi Jolly served the Army as a mule packer, guide and scout. From May 13, 1868, to August 7, 1869 Hi Jolly served as Pack Master at Fort McDowell with a salary of $100 per month. For reasons that remain unclear Hi Jolly left the Army once again and then returned on October 25, 1869 as simply a Packer and for only $45 a month.

It has been said that Hi Jolly worked as a prospector during his various departures from serving the Army. Stories also circulate that this was the period when Hi Jolly turned his last camel loose into the desert near Gila Bend returning to Fort McDowell soon after. On January 1, 1870, Tedro’s designation changed once again. Now the man is cited as Guide and Scout and is said to have is “served as such until his discharge on June 20, 1870.”

To gain some perspective on Hi Jolly’s activities and role in the settlement of the southwest we should note that the Battle of the Little Big Horn did not take place until June 25, 1876. This was the infamous battle between the U.S. Army’s seventh cavalry, led by George Armstrong Custer (guided by Crow and Arikara scouts) and several bands of Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Also known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” the entire command of 220 men (cavalry soldiers, officers and Indian scouts) was wiped out.

Hi Jolly’s exact whereabouts and precise actions are unclear until, once again in 1880 he was employed, by the Army in Tucson. It was during his tenure at Tucson that the a man most people in the West knew as “Hi Jolly” is said to have taken on his “Greek name” Philip Tedro (sometimes also spelled Teadro and even Teadrow) when he became a naturalized citizen on May 7, 1857.

Since this was also the same year Tedro married we can suspect that more than just reemployment with the Army occupied his thoughts. It has been said that Hi Jolly emphasized his Greek ethnicity, at this particular time, so that he would be able to marry. Whatever the case maybe we know for certain that in 1880 Tedro married Gertrude Serna of Tucson and lived in that city for a time. He is reported to have been with the Army at Huachuca and other posts until the surrender of Geronimo and the last of the Chiricahua Apaches in 1886. As with so many other moments in his life Philip Tedro’s role as one of the very last of the “Indian Scouts” employed by the US Army during this crucial moment of settlement in the American southwest, has never been systematically studied. In the meantime he became the father of two girls, Amelia and Herminia, both born in Tucson.

A few years before he died Hi Jolly moved to a cabin near Quartzsite where he mined with a burro. The town of Quartzsite (who’s original name was Tyson’s Wells, which is how the old Greek would have known it) is a high desert town on the very fringe of the Mojave Desert.

Philip Tedro died walking along the old desert road from the Colorado River to Wickenburg on December 16, 1902, at the age 73. Tedro was buried in the Quartzsite Cemetery. All this was a full ten years before the Arizona Territory became the 48th state in the Union.

The legends have it that Hi Jolly was searching for one of his camels when he died. That Tedro did in fact find the camel during a sand storm and was discovered dead the next day with his arm across the camel’s neck is one of this man’s most en-during legends. Newspaper accounts report that to his dying day, Hi Jolly believed that a few of the camels still roamed the desert. And he was right. The last wild camel in Arizona was captured in 1946. The last reported sighting of a wild camel in North America was in Baja California in 1956.