Sara A. Lewis: Welcome to Points South. I’m your host, Sara A. Lewis of the Oxford American. In 2019, journalist Sasha von Oldershausen reported an essay for the OA about a strange and forgotten chapter of American history: when camels roamed the deserts of West Texas in the service of the U.S. military. In this episode, Christian Adam Brown and contributor Annie Rosenthal take us on a journey to understand the Camel Experiment’s connections to western expansion. And the enduring legacy and legend of one of its most mysterious characters – a man named Hi Jolly.

Christian Adam Brown: In early January, I was out in the Arizona desert, in a town called Quartzsite. It’s pretty much the last stop on I-10 before you hit California, and the town is basically a collection of RV parks at the intersection of two major highways…A huge, flat expanse surrounded by mountains. And rolling down the road through the town… was this parade. It reminded me a lot of small town parades where I grew up, in rural north Georgia. It’s mostly white people, older guys on Harleys, lots of American flags…And of course, a church float…

Jennifer: If you all are in town, and want to come to the meeting…

CAB: All the normal stuff you’d expect. Except, pretty much everywhere you look, there were…camels.

Jo Jolly: Camel mania!

CAB: I mean there was camel stuff everywhere. This tiny lady was standing right next to me — wearing a huge hat with a stuffed camel on it. Lots of people were wearing camel costumes. There were trucks with camel decals. A camel piñata. Even a live camel walking down the middle of the road.

JJ: Camels are really crazy to ride.

CAB: And then she starts demonstrating…

JJ: I had a horse. You get on a horse.. And you go! You get on a camel… First off, they have to be all on their knees, and then you just kind of step onto it, and then they put the hind legs up! And so you go, and then they put the front legs up! and like this! Ride that Camel!

CAB: So it wasn’t exactly like your average small-town get together after all. And what is the name of this parade?

Jennifer: The Hi Jolly Daze Parade.

Annie Rosenthal: The Hi Jolly Daze Parade. It’s an annual tradition in Quartzsite.

CAB: That’s Annie Rosenthal. She’s a reporter and radio producer in Texas.

AR: It’s a celebration of the town’s most famous local character — a guy named Hadji Ali, a camel driver who ended up here at the turn of the 20th century.

CAB: Annie’s the one who told me about this parade.

AR: Christian and I had been researching this guy, Hadji Ali, or “Hi Jolly.” He’s one of the Southwest’s most amazing and unlikely folk heroes…a Middle Eastern Muslim guy who ended up at the intersection of many of the biggest stories in American history. And then I learned that he’s the subject of this extremely joyful, bizarre celebration in small-town southern Arizona. You know, good old boys and church ladies and CAMELS traipsing down the road between the Saguaro cacti of the Sonoran desert. So we wanted to understand: who was this guy, really? How did he — and all these camels — end up in Quartzsite? And what exactly is it that’s being celebrated here?

CAB: And to answer that question, we had to start in the South.

Doug Baum: I’m gonna start feeding. Just watch your step because of the mud. I don’t have a mean one in the bunch. Just know that if you linger in front of their face… they want to eat.

CAB: A few weeks after the parade, we were standing in a barn in Central Texas, in front of some rather intimidating-looking camels…braving the perilous zone around their mouths because…we wanted to talk to their owner.

DB: Uh, name is Doug Baum. I own Texas Camel Corps. Uh, what I do with our family’s camels… I travel to schools, libraries, museums, historical sites, telling the story of the 19th century US Army Camel Experiment. And I also guide Camel Treks here in Texas and abroad.

AR: To understand Hi Jolly, you have to start with the camels. And if you want to talk camels in the U.S., you talk to Doug.

CAB: Doug grew up in Waco, Texas. In the early 90s, he was a zookeeper in Nashville, giving camel rides to kids. And for Christmas one year, somebody gave him a book called Noble Brutes: Camels on the American Frontier.

AR: The book was about something called the Camel Experiment. Doug said when he read it, he was totally amazed.

DB: I'm like one of those obnoxiously proud Texans, and I didn't know this story?!

AR. That story starts in the 1850s. The U.S. has just won the Mexican American War, in which Mexico gives up more than half its territory — what’s today the American Southwest, from New Mexico over to California. So the U.S. has all this new land. And to top it off, prospectors have just found gold in California. But…there’s no way to get there. No highways — not even trains yet.

DB: And then you've got this Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who starts to really promote the idea of camels.

CAB: Yes, that Jefferson Davis. The guy who became the president of the Confederacy.

AR: Now, at this point, Southern secession is still a few years off. But that doesn’t mean Davis’ motivations were noble ones.

DB: He was really looking west, and a lot of folks could probably argue that he was looking west to potentially expand slavery into the Western states.

AR: This is, in fact, an established historical fact. Davis’ big plan was to build a railroad all the way to California. The Pacific coast was where he figured the South could export cotton — and hopefully get in on the gold.

CAB: I’d never heard anything like this — in history class or anywhere.

AR: Yeah — I think so often we tend to think about Southern history and western history in isolation…but here’s this case where the tensions of the South are really pushing Westward expansion.

CAB: So Davis needs a way to scout out this route — and he hears from some other guys about this idea of bringing in…Camels Now, as Doug points out, this idea didn’t come out of nowhere.

DB: The British had incredible history, uh, using camels in all of their colonial exploits from, uh, Sudan to India. Everywhere they were in, in desert places, the British would've used camels.

AR: Camels are uniquely suited to the desert environment: they don’t need much water, they can eat pretty much anything, and they can carry a lot more weight than horses or mules. All big selling points for long, dry trips out west.

CAB: So in 1855, Davis convinces Congress to spend $30,000 - sending some military guys to Europe and the Middle East. They buy a bunch of camels - and eventually get 75 of them on boats back to east Texas. But… As for how they’re received…?

HAWMPS! Character 1: “My men are gonna get on those camels, and….ride them?

HAWMPS! Character 2: Yes, sir.

HAWMPS! Character 1: Outside the fort, where people can see them?”

AR: That’s how the moment was imagined in a movie called Hawmps! — which I have to tell you is spelled H-A-W-M-P-S exclamation point — a ’70s slapstick comedy about the Camel Experiment. So, obviously fictional, but not totally inaccurate.

DB: Forever and ever the American West will be… absolutely tied to the image of someone on horseback… So regardless of what the animal was, if it was not a horse, it was gonna be laughable.

CAB: The American military didn’t know what to do with the camels. Luckily for them, though, on their trip across the Atlantic, they’d hired some people who did.

DB: Subjects of the Ottoman Empire, whether they were Greek or ethnic Turk or Arab, joined up and there were not quite a dozen of them.

CAB: Now, some of those guys are just there to get the camels to the U.S. — and after that, they turn around and get on the next boat home. But some of them stick around. And the challenge they’re given — these immigrant cameleers and their U.S. army officers — is to take the camels all the way west.

AR: It’s a journey of hundreds of miles, over some of the driest, most treacherous terrain in the country. And it takes them six months, but they do it. They cross the continent.

DB: So the camel’s story really threads from Indianola, Texas on the Gulf Coast all the way to Los Angeles. And every step in between, basically modern Highway 90, Interstate 10, these really are old camel trails. And if anybody's driven modern I-40 or Route 66, that's a camel trail.

AR: It’s still kind of astonishing to me — that these most All-American roads, the ones that make it possible for me in Texas to reach LA, where you live, Christian — were charted by camels!

CAB: That's right! These camels are this huge, forgotten part of what we think of as the “closing of the frontier” — and yet they’re behind the infrastructure for, like, every great American road trip ever. But…once they made it to California, the government wasn’t so sure it wanted them to stick around. Doug says…that didn’t have much to do with the camels themselves…

DB: The camels were a practical success, but a political failure…You gotta think about it. What’s to fail? This is an animal that had, uh, well at this point has worked for man for 5,000 years…

CAB: But certain U.S. officials seemed to have it in for the animals, complaining about things like… the way they smelled, the way they interacted with mules…and within just a few years, the U.S. had other things to focus on — like…the Civil War.

DB: So yeah, post-war, because Davis' name is mud, the camels are sold.

CAB: Some of the camels went to circuses, some hauled mail. And some ended up just wandering around out in the desert.

AR: And those camel drivers who’d been hired to lead them? Suddenly, they found themselves stranded in an unfamiliar country with nothing to do. One of them was Hadji Ali. Now, a lot of even the most basic facts about Hadji Ali’s early life are still contested. He was either born Filippou Teodora or Philip Tedro in 1828. He likely had one Greek parent and one Syrian, but there’s a lot of debate over his nationality.

CAB: As a young man, he worked for the French in Algeria — that’s probably where he first got acquainted with camels. And most scholars agree that he converted from Orthodox Christianity to Islam in his twenties, which is when he adopted his new name. Hadji is an honorific that signified he’d made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

DB: So the Americans hear Hi Jolly, and he becomes kind of a face for these guys who came and worked with the camels.

AR: In government records about the Camel Experiment, Hi Jolly is little more than a footnote. But he went on to become kind of a legend in the Southwest. There are multiple children’s books written about him. He’s a character in at least two movies. He even becomes the subject of a folk song.

The New Christy Minstrels (Hi Jolly Lyrics): Hi Jolly was a camel driver, long time ago. He followed Mr. Blaine way out west. Didn't mind the burning sand in that God-forsaken land. But he didn't mind the pretty gals the best.

DB: Hi Jolly really, uh, remains an enigma from the day that he signed on in Izmir, Turkey to the day he dies in Quartzsite, Arizona. And if there were a historical figure I could sit down with and drink a glass of tea, Hi Jolly would be that guy.

CAB: Doug isn’t the only one who feels that way. Over the last century, scholars of all kinds — from religious historians to ecologists — have combed the archives for information on Hi Jolly. And not just because of the Camel Experiment! It turns out he was one of the earliest recorded Muslim immigrants to America — outside any enslaved people who’d taken on Islam.

Gary Paul Nabhan: North Africans, Turks, Syrians, among many have claimed him as one of their own. And what I think is interesting about it is, that this echoes years of American ambivalence about North African and Middle Eastern influence on our own culture.

AR: That’s Gary Paul Nabhan, a leading U.S. ethnobotanist. He wrote about Hi Jolly in his book “Arab/American,” exploring the cultural links between the deserts of the Middle East, where his Lebanese family is from, and the American Southwest, where he lives. Gary says Hi Jolly’s story plays a big role in bringing to light a forgotten part of American immigration history — that of people from Africa and the Middle East into the South, through Texas and Mexico!

GPN: Crypto-Muslims and Crypto-Jews poured into the United States long before the first Arab came through New York or Boston. And yet we don't tell those stories because we're so Eastern centric… This is a hidden part of American history that's just as valuable as what we know about George Washington and Ben Franklin and Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.

AR: That was what first interested me about Hi Jolly: trying to figure out how he fits into this pantheon of men whose myths shape our collective understanding of America. What people are celebrating in him as a folk hero.

Téa Obreht: I think that people are celebrating and remembering the idea of, of both journey and destination, and the mythos of what the West represents, which is, you know, this, this individual striking out, arriving at the intended location and leaving behind a mark.

AR: Téa Obreht is a novelist who wrote a book called “Inland” that features Hadji Ali as a character.

TO: But with so many folk heroes, and in particular, the sort of lesser known ones, the individual experience and how difficult it might have been and how isolated and how troubling often gets lost.

AR: Téa’s novel focuses on a fictional Bosnian immigrant who tags along with the Camel Corps. In the afterword, she writes:

TO: Though Hadji Ali is not the book’s principal specter, he was nevertheless the thing that most haunted me: an Ottoman subject caught between his old empire and his new one, not quite belonging anywhere…

AR: The complex politics of his journey west were part of what stuck with Téa. Even disregarding the Jefferson Davis connection, it was part of a project of conquest — meant to spread Christianity and capitalism across the continent, displacing or massacring the Indigenous people who’d long called this land home.

TO: It struck me that Hi Jolly, having been under the boot heel of one empire in his birthplace, and then arriving here, to be the sort of flexed arm of another empire, he would recognize his function.

AR: Now, we’ll never be sure how he really felt about his role — in part because Hadji Ali didn’t seem to have been able to write in English. But we know that when the camels were sold and dispersed, he stuck with them, heading back east into the Arizona Territory.

CAB: He worked as a packer, and an army scout. In 1880, he married a Sonoran woman in Tucson, and they had three kids. At first, he seemed to assimilate into Southwest society.

AR: But he couldn’t really settle down. Soon, he started heading out on prospecting trips that got longer and longer until, eventually, his wife got fed up with him and he split from the family for good. And that’s when he ended up in Quartzsite.

CAB: Back then, it was a classic little western town, with a saloon and a stagecoach stop. Lots of people were there to find gold. Hadji Ali didn’t have much luck on the prospecting front, but he did achieve some kind of notoriety, becoming this kinda famous guy around town.

TO: I think that he was quite concerned with belonging, and that he wanted not only to be part of the undertaking of westward expansion and conquest, but that he wanted to be acknowledged as part of it. And so he would show up at newspaper offices to sort of remind people there about his role in the Camel Corps, the mythos of which was beginning to fade as fewer and fewer of the camels were seen around and died and sort of fell out of personal possession and into the wild.

CAB: In 1901, old and sick, he petitioned the government for his pension. His friends helped him write a statement.

AR: “30 years of frontier service have so undermined my constitution and broken me down that now in my old age, I find myself no longer able to gain a livelihood, and unless Congress votes me some relief, I shall be forced to ending my days in an almshouse.”

CAB: Powerful people wrote in support of him. But in response, Hi Jolly was told that he’d never been formally enlisted in the army, so there would be no pension.

AR: In her book, Téa imagines his reflection on that moment.

TO: “All my life some fool has promised me this or that. My father promised me manhood, but all I got was capture. The French promised me gold, but all I got were a couple of camels. Beale promised me pay—do you know he never had me enlisted? I am entitled to nothing—no back pay, no pension? He never even put in the papers to make me an American. Ten years I worked for that man, and learned only that I might as well never have existed.”

CAB: It really hit me that — for someone who’s now celebrated so joyously in Quartzsite, his time there seemed…incredibly sad.

AR: Yeah. This image of this man, abandoned by the government he served, estranged from his family, penniless in this desert town thousands and thousands of miles from home…It’s hard to square that with, you know, camel mania!

CAB: If there’s one place that Hi Jolly’s legacy lives on today, it’s Quartzsite. They hold the world’s biggest celebration of Hi Jolly — every year! They’re arguably some of his biggest fans! But people there don’t necessarily seem focused on his religious importance, or, you know, his complicated role in American history.

AR: We wanted to figure out what it was that Hi Jolly found in Quartzsite — and what it is that the town finds in him. Quartzsite. Next two exits. So on a Friday in late February — Christian was driving, and I was keeping an eye out for roadside attractions. There it is…the famous camel sign right outside the Mobil. And Gem World!

CAB: We got out of the car at a low-slung adobe building: the Quartzsite Museum…and signed into the guest book.

AR: Wow. People are coming from all over the place. There's visitors from…Washington, Wisconsin, Michigan, Oregon, Maine, Montana, Colorado, California, Texas.
Lynn Stimson: That’s how many people show up every day!

AR: That’s Lynn Stimson, President of the Quartzsite Historical Society. Like Hi Jolly, Lynn came to Quartzsite from Tucson, and she’s lived several lives: she was a dog groomer, a drag racer, and eventually a beautician. She still has the skills she mastered in the salon — she’s a small, white woman with short, spiky purple hair.

LS: I’ve had black hair and blonde hair and streaks, and I’ve had pink hair. I mean pink hair when we were doing it with Kool-Aid.

AR: But these days, Lynn has a new area of expertise. She’s in charge of this museum — the keeper of the facts of Hi Jolly’s life.

LS: If you want to start in this room, this is our mining room…And that's the room that has some of our Hi Jolly stuff.

AR: A little closet to the left held a bunch of historical signs about Hi Jolly – plus, the things in his possession when he died: a few coins and a small box of what may or may not be the ashes of his favorite camel. But it was the back of the building that made his presence feel real.

LS: where you’re standing is where Hi Jolly died.

CAB: Well, maybe. Some historians go with a more dramatic account. One night, Hi Jolly heard two cowboys at the local bar say they’d seen some camel wandering around nearby. Without skipping a beat, he headed out in the middle of a sandstorm to find it. The next day, the cowboys came upon his body out in the desert, his arms wrapped around the camel.

AR: Lynn said, that’s not true at all.

LS: That's one of those stories…no. So, we know for a fact that he did die in this room here, and he was just ill.

AR: Still, Lynn said, he wasn’t alone. She showed us a sign about one woman, Mary Isabel Pease.

LS: She and different women took care of Hi Jolly in his last years when he was old. They made sure he had food. If he got sick, they would take care of him and things like that.

CAB: Lynn said it was his Quartzsite neighbors who buried Hi Jolly when he died, and who eventually rallied to commemorate his life.

AR: By the early 1930s, just a few decades later, Arizona had become a state, and the government was hard at work building out its highway system.

LS: And so the highway department was trying to figure out what they were going to do to have something for people to come and visit. So the town got together and said, we should do a monument to Hi Jolly.

AR: And the state built the monument: a rock pyramid topped with a camel, right over his grave. There was a big dedication ceremony, attended by the governor, the state historian. And over time, Lynn said, the monument did exactly what it was intended to do. Now, when you Google things to do in Quartzsite, the Hi Jolly Monument is at the top of the list.

LS: And people come from all over the world. We've had Muslim people from Syria, from Turkey come just to see his monument.

CAB: But as Lynn explained, the vast majority of visitors aren’t Hi Jolly fanatics. They’re roadtrippers or snowbirds — folks from the colder northern states who head down south to wait out the winter in a Winnebago or an Airstream.

AR: By the ’80s, Quartzsite had become basically the nation’s capital for snowbirds. From November to April, the town’s population now swells from some 2,000 to nearly 1.5 million. In February, from far away, the place looks less like a truck stop and more like a sprawling city…the RVs arranged out across the desert like little white LEGOs.

CAB: Quartzsite comes to life in these warm winter months. There are swap meets, gem shows, a big meet-up called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous — which is where part of the movie Nomadland was filmed. And then, of course, there’s the parade.

LS: The first time the town was incorporated as a town, which did not happen until the 1980s, they decided to have a Hi Jolly parade.

AR: I asked Lynn why the town decided on a Hi Jolly Parade.

LS: Just to have a celebration. And everybody said, let’s have a Hi Jolly parade, because he’s our famous person here.

AR: Now, on the surface, it’s a simple question that gets a simple answer. But this is actually one of the things that most fascinates me about the ways Hi Jolly is remembered. As far as Lynn knows, there aren’t any Muslims living in Quartzsite today — and according to the most recent census, the town is 98 percent white. Meanwhile, we’re in a county that voted twice for Trump, who championed the Muslim ban…and less than a hundred miles from the border in a state famous for its anti-immigrant policies. It’s not a place I’d expect people to be holding a festival in honor of a Muslim immigrant from the Middle East — even if he’s the most famous guy around. Gary Paul Nabhan, the guy who wrote “Arab/American,” says this is the paradox of Hi Jolly’s celebration.

GPN: Many of the films of the last 20 years, where they need an enemy, plug in Arabs. And it’s ironic that everything we know about Hadji Ali was that he was a cross-cultural trader and raconteur that people love to interact with, rather than an enemy.

AR: Gary sees some of that as about timing — around when Hi Jolly got to Quartzsite, he says, Middle Easterners were acquiring an exotic allure in American pop culture. But, he says…

GPN: since 1980, that’s flipped, and we’ve found that Arabs are the most reviled people in America.

AR: And Gary told me he was curious about what’s happening in Quartzsite, too.

GPN: The Hadji Ali Daze somehow attracts people who grew up on Arizona Highways and Desert Magazine and Sunset Magazine as sort of, that life on the road in an intriguing landscape. And I don’t really quite understand whether most people recognize that he was of Arab and Turkish heritage.

AR: So I asked Lynn about it.

LS: I don’t think they think of Hi Jolly as being Muslim. They think of Hi Jolly as being a camel driver. Now, at the time he came here as a camel driver, he had to come from some place where they had camels. Does that make sense? Any time there’s a legend of any kind, then people pick up on it and they want the stories to be good stories. I think we in the Southwest have our legendary person in Hi Jolly.

CAB: That night, some fellow visitors to the museum invited us to join them at an event down the road. A nomad named Cindy laid out the evening’s activities.

Cindy Black: Tonight there’s hot air balloons, there’s bands. There’s camels there right now, you can go get your picture taken or go for a camel ride.

CAB: I’m going for a camel ride.

CB: Are you really?

CAB: I have to. Now, I had second thoughts once I was standing in front of an imposing dromedary named Shock Top. But Cindy didn’t hesitate.

CB: Oh my gosh. Can’t believe I’m doing this. Humpety. Humpety. Humpety, hump, hump. Okay. Oh my gosh. Lord. I feel like, well, I am in the desert and I am on a camel

CAB: On second thought… Maybe I should have gotten on that camel. It was hard not to smile while watching Cindy up there. But looking around — at the hot air balloons, ready to launch; the vendors selling those little yard ornaments that spin around in the wind…I got the feeling that here, Hi Jolly serves a similar purpose. Something colorful and entertaining, but maybe not much more.

AR: And then we met Carla. Most people were standing around drinking beer and listening to the band, and this one lady was running around, chasing a guy on an ATV and laughing. When she saw us watching, she came over to chat. We told her we were in town to learn about Hi Jolly, and she invited us to come and visit her at work the next day.

Carla: I'll tell you what, if you guys come to Quail Run RV Park tomorrow…

AR: And I have to say — I’m really glad we took her up on it. Hey, how's it going?

CAB: Morning.

Carla: How are you? Hi. I'm the crazy girl.

AR: And we’re your devoted followers. We found you. Carla was sitting behind the desk at the park’s front office. She’s in her late 50s, and she was one of the few non-white RV-residents we’d met — she said her family is Mexican, Spanish, and Indigenous. Before she moved here, she was living in Vegas, where she had a housecleaning business. But two years ago, she and her husband decided to hit the road.

Carla: Life’s too short. I want to enjoy it. I don’t want to work all my life.

AR: Now, Carla is technically still working — as are many of her fellow nomads. These days, it’s not just retirees chasing the sunsets on the highways of the Southwest…since the 2008 recession, when the U.S. economy imploded and nearly 10 million Americans lost their homes, people around the country have opted for a more affordable life on the road, following work with the seasons. Scanning merchandise at Amazon warehouses, harvesting sugar beets, managing RV hook-ups at places like Quail Run.
Carla: Most park people that work, you get free rent and utilities for 20 hours a week. Where else can you live for free?

CAB: This season, Carla's gone full Quartzsite — even wearing a set of silver camel earrings.
Carla: They just want us to wear ’em because we work here and it’s Quartzsite, it’s their symbol.

AR: Carla said she didn’t know much about the story behind the camels, or Hi Jolly, really. But she was excited about the part of Quartzsite history that had brought him out here in the first place. She told us lots of the Quail Run residents still go out prospecting in the hills.
Carla: My husband bought me a Gold Monster 1000 for Valentine's Day. He's never bought me a Valentine's present before, but he bought me my gold monster. (laughs) It’s a metal detector.

CAB: Just then, a lady walked in to pay her final bill.

Carla: I can't believe you guys are leaving us. You’re gonna miss us.

Park resident: Of course we are. I already do. And don't make me cry.

Carla: I can't believe you guys are going back to sticks and bricks.

AR: When the woman left, Carla turned back to us. These days, she said, she finds it hard to wrap her head around people opting for the monotony of an immobile home.
Carla: You know what? I told my daughter, get an RV. Take my grandson on it. Stop working at a nine to five job. Go. She’s, she’s afraid to do it.

AR: It’s scary. Seems scary to kind of, yeah, let go of the things that you're taught to look for and to work for. You know, the stability of…
Carla: What is stability? Stability is living your life the way you want to, not the way society tells you to.

CAB: And, she said, Quartzsite isn’t a bad place to spend your last days, even if you’re on your own.
Carla: There are a lot of single people here and we know who they are, so we kind of try to keep an eye on them. You know? We had one guy that was sick, so we made sure we took him… we took him soup. You know? We take care of, this is our community. And that's what I like living this lifestyle other than living in the sticks and bricks. Because half the time nowadays you don't know your neighbors. You don't know what's going on. Here, you know your neighbor, you know…We take care of each other.

AR: Yeah. It feels like in a city or something, if something were to happen to you, your neighbor might not come check on you.
Carla: Until you start smelling. Sorry.

AR: Listening to Carla, It was hard not to think of Hi Jolly — an old man who lived out his final days in Quartzsite, who spent decades working towards the American Dream and found himself left empty-handed. And of the women here who made sure he wasn’t alone — who came to bring HIM food in his old age, and found ways to keep telling his story after he died.

CAB: Suddenly, the celebration of Hi Jolly in Quartzsite didn’t seem so strange, or so shallow — even when it’s coming from people who might prefer not to look past the camel driver label to the complex identities beneath. This was a man who’d lived among nomads long before he even arrived in the U.S. Who’d improvised a life of perpetual motion, of constant reinvention. And who became a legend in a place where strangers look out for another, finding home without ever settling down.

AR: More than a century later, it’s sort of amazing to see that his journey across the continent — one wrapped up in conquest and colonization — has given way to a lifestyle that opts out of ownership. I like to think he may have found what it seems the nomads have here: the freedom that comes from reclaiming a life of adventure, rejecting the kind of stability, the comforts he’d been denied.

CAB: Carla had stuff to do, so we thanked her and said our goodbyes. She gave us a big bag of peppermints and a final nudge to ditch the fixed address. The sun was strong and the wind was picking up, but we had one more stop to make.

AR: Hi Jolly’s monument is a huge pyramid right at the entrance to the cemetery, silhouetted dramatically against the mountains. On the front is a plaque with information on his birth and death, and a description: “Camel driver, packer, scout, over thirty years a faithful aid to the U.S. government.”

CAB: The birth place listed on the plaque is actually a point of contention — it says “somewhere in Syria,” though lots of historians now argue he was actually born in what’s now Turkey. And that feels representative of the legend of Hi Jolly, from beginning to end: there’s so little we know for sure, so much room for debate.

AR: And that’s really part of his intrigue: for a zookeeper, a scientist, a novelist, a small-town beautician-turned-historian…and for us. That he remains a mystery allows us to imagine into the gaps, weaving a story with whichever parts we each choose to remember or forget.

CAB: And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you see that process unfold — history taking on new meaning for someone…before your very eyes. Cindy. How are you? Good to see you.

CB: Nice to see you.

CAB: Cindy’s the nomad we met at the historical society. The one who rode the camel. She pulled up in a car just as we were getting ready to leave.

AR: Cindy told us she’d been here for two weeks, and she was starting to feel ready to get moving again — maybe to Phoenix, or to see the Grand Canyon. But before that, she wanted to pay a visit.

CB: I was thinking about Mr. Jolly or Hi Jolly, or however you say his name. And I just thought, I dunno. I'll come and see him again.

AR: You got anything to say to him when you get in there?

CB: Yeah! Now that I've experienced camel riding, yes. I have a few things that I'd like to say to him, ya know… like, thank you for bringing the opportunity around that I can ride on your camels….it was weird because he came from the desert to the desert, which is, I don't know why he came here of all places, but he did. And his legend lives on here. Everybody knows him. Everybody knows his name.

CAB: And that was that. Cindy headed into the cemetery.

CB: All right.

CAB: Okay. All my friend. Safe travel, safe travels.

AR: We watched her for a second, standing in front of Hi Jolly’s monument, with the wind blowing around her. And then we got in the car, and back on the road.

SAL: See photos from Christian and Annie’s camel reporting, a short film about the Camel Experiment — and read Sasha von Oldershausen’s original essay — at OxfordAmerican.org/pointssouth. This episode was produced by me, Christian Adam Brown, and Annie Rosenthal. Thanks to Curtis Fye and Trey Pollard of Spacebomb for our series sound design and score. Additional sound design and score by Christian Adam Brown. Thanks to Doug Baum, Téa Obreht, Gary Nabhan, and Lynn Stimson for their time and insights. And a special thanks to Farooq Ahmed for his guidance. This episode is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.