A Timely Saga Almost Forgotten In Arizona History >
How fast the political backlash and fears for safety strike out from Arizona Governor Ducey and both 5th District Congressman Matt Salmon and 9th District Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema calling for actions restricting immigration from Syria and The Middle East.
Yet "once upon a time and not so long ago" what was then the United States in the mid-19th century - oops! this territory was once part of The Confederacy - decided to establish a Camel Military Corps involving 77 dromedaries imported from The Ottoman Empire, along with six Turks and a Syrian named Hadji Ali for military purposes and reconnaissance.
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| Hi Jolly Monument in Quartzite [Tyson;s Well] |
Unwilling or unable to pronounce his name correctly, the Confederate army gave Ali a corrupted nickname. The moniker stuck, and throughout the rest of his life, the displaced cameleer-immigrant was known simply as “Hi Jolly.”
The story of Hi Jolly began in 1855 when Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was told of an innovative plan to import camels to help build and supply a Western wagon route from Texas to California. It was a dry, hot and otherwise hostile region, not unlike the camel's natural terrain in the Middle East.
Davis, convinced of the idea, proposed a Camel Military Corps to Congress. "For military purposes, and for reconnaissance, it is believed the dromedary would supply a want now seriously felt in our service," he explained. Congress agreed and appropriated $30,000.
Efforts to span the deserts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California had been largely unsuccessful using horse and mule transports, but communication and transportation were crucial to controlling the region.
In a report from June 1857 Lieutenant Edward Beale, leader of one of the expeditions, indicated the great advantages of camel travel. The camels, he noted, did not need grass but could eat all forms of desert brush and managed for days without water. He reported that “they are the most docile, patient, and easily managed creatures in the world,” even in the trying conditions of the harsh American southwest.
Readers can look into more details here in an account called "Strangers in a Strange Land: Hi Jolly and the U.S. Camel Corps" on the History Bandits website.
It begins with this: In Quartzsite, Arizona, an odd monument stands just off Highway 95. Erected in 1935, it is inscribed as “the last camp of Hi Jolly.” This marker, crowned with a copper camel, seems out of place in the desert of western Arizona. It stands as a testament to the bizarre experience of a group of strangers brought to the American west in the mid-19th century. These foreign imports, both men and beast, served American expansionism for a time, and then were rejected as something too exotic to be included in the exclusive American frontier.
Oddly, 150 years later there are many corps of people and human refugees fleeing the U.S. military expansion in the Middle East and what's left of The Ottoman Empire.
Official Arizona historian Marshall Trimble has some important details to add in this article
from Russia Today RT.com
Other details readers might find interesting can be found here
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