The Last Camp of Hi Jolly

and the London Bridge at Lake Havasu

I’d detour a mile for a camel.

This camel is on the tombstone of Hadji Ali, a Syrian Greek who served as a driver in the short-lived but infamously failed U.S. Camel Corps. Ali and several other camel drivers successfully traveled with the animals from Texas to California and back, the experiment was deemed a failure because the camels frightened the Army’s horses and burros, and thus were unsuited to serve as pack animals.

No one held it against the camel drivers who were hired to train soldiers to use them. The camels were auctioned off, and Ali became known as Hi Jolly, and remained in the country as a scout and pack driver who delivered freight using his camels. This venture became unprofitable, and he released his camels into the desert, settling down to raise a family, sometimes scouting for the Army, and becoming a living legend, dying in 1902. In 1935, the Governor of Arizona had a monument in the shape of a pyramid topped with a camel erected on his grave.

We visited his storied grave site on our road trip to the Grand Canyon. I learned of Hi Jolly when my friend Kim told me of the Red Ghost of the Arizona desert. At times described to be thirty feet tall and ridden by a devil, toppling wagons, this monster wrought havoc at remote sites in the desert until 1893, when a rancher shot it. The beast turned out to be one of the lost camels of the U.S. Camel Corps or one of their progeny, with a skeleton strapped to its back. The skeleton’s identity remains unknown, but everything from a soldier trying to ride it to a lost prospector hoping to find water have been suggested. There’s a junk statue of a red camel nearby, made of car parts (which I would have visited if I’d known about it) outside a store. There’s not much else in Quartzsite, Arizona. Not even an In-N-Out Burger.

Lake Havasu not only has an In-N-Out Burger, but the original London Bridge. In typical Wild West huckster fashion, some local with too much money bought the original when it was dismantled to be rebuilt to handle modern traffic, and brought the cladding bricks to this pretty spot on a reservoir north of the Bill Williams River. There’s a wildlife refuge on the way, where I spotted a Great Blue Heron and a Cormorant before going for my double-double animal style and fries. At the bridge itself, we saw local grackles, Great-taileds, I think.

There’s one in the water. This video of a Great-tailed Grackle was taken a few days later outside our hotel, but I love his song, so I’ll share it here.

Next week: The Grand Canyon!

I’ll let Southern Culture on the Skids sing you out.