For anyone familiar with the town of Quartzsite, Arizona, people living a carefree, itinerant lifestyle might come to mind. This little desert town of less than four thousand residents is 125 miles west of Phoenix, but boasts over two million visitors a year. Most of those visitors live in vans or RVs.
Quartzsite, in fact, plays a substantial role in the Academy Award-winning film Nomadland (Best Picture, 2021) based on the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. (The book is well worth reading.)
The book and movie chronicle the lives of a few individuals who are “houseless” due to either temporary or lifelong economic challenges. As nomads, they travel in their vans or RVs, looking for and finding temporary jobs in various parts of the United States. Quartzsite is where they congregate during the winter, especially in January. Because of friendships that are rekindled year after year, they become family to each other.
Apart from these modern-day nomads, there was a nomad in the mid-1800s who became quite famous in Quartzsite and is buried there. He went by several different names: Philip Tedro, Hadji Ali, and, more commonly, Hi Jolly.
Jolly became the caretaker of thirty-three camels that Secretary of War Jefferson Davis sent to Texas for transporting freight across the Southwest. Davis felt that camels would help solve the transportation problems that the Army was experiencing at that time. Forty-one more camels were sent later. In the end, though, the project was abandoned and the camels were left to roam in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.
As for the nomadic caretaker Hi Jolly, many stories exist about him. Some reports say he grew up as a Muslim in Syria and then changed his name to one of Greek lineage (Philip Tedro) so he would be more acceptable to his Catholic girlfriend’s family as he asked for her hand in marriage. Another story is that he was born to Greek parents in Syria, but didn’t convert to Islam until he was an adult. He eventually settled in Quartzsite, though, and was allegedly married to two women simultaneously.
Toward the end of his life, after he tried once more to connect with one of his wives and was turned down, he started wandering in the desert around Quartzsite to find a lost camel. He died in 1902 at the age of 74, never having found that camel. His remains were returned to Quartzsite where he was finally buried.
Even though he was known as having a feisty demeanor, the locals in Quartzsite really liked and admired him. His burial site stands out in the local cemetery because it is marked by a pyramid with a metal camel on top. The locals built this pyramid of quartz, petrified wood, and other materials.
A few signs, explaining the story of Hi Jolly and the camel experiment, dot the cemetery. The sign below summarizes this unusual piece of U.S. history and the man integrally connected to it. Hopefully, you will find this as interesting as we did.
