In March 1855 Congress set aside $30,000 for the War Department to buy camels. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who accepted the notion that much of the West was a "Great American Desert," wanted them to carry freight and to help the Army deal with Indian raiding in Texas. Maj. H. C. Wayne came back from the Mediterranean with thirty-three camels, three Arabs and two Turks. The ship reached Indianola in the spring of 1856, the caravan walked west, and the animals ended up at Camp Verde in Kerr County. A second shipment of forty-one followed.
The drivers
The best known of the men who came with them was Hadji Ali, born around 1828 as Philip Tedro in Smyrna, to a Greek mother and a Syrian father, according to Aramco World. He had become a Muslim, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and worked as a camel breeder and driver, and he was one of eight men hired in Smyrna. Texans struggled with the name, and "Hi Jolly" stuck. The magazine reports that the drivers do not appear to have been well treated. Several, Hi Jolly among them, struck at least once over pay, and they were housed in a shed behind the camel barn, apart from the troops.
What the camels did
Wayne reported that they rose and walked with as much as 600 pounds, went miles without water and ate almost any plant. In 1857 twenty-five of them went with Edward Beale's survey of a wagon road from New Mexico to the Colorado River, and on to California. One trek reached the unexplored Big Bend. The Handbook of Texas says the experiment did not fail for lack of ability, since every test showed the camel to be a superior pack animal. They smelled, they frightened horses, and handlers used to mules detested them.
After Camp Verde
The post surrendered to the Confederacy in 1861, and eighty camels and two Egyptian drivers passed into Confederate hands. Some were turned out on the range near the camp, some carried cotton to Brownsville, and one carried a whole company's baggage for Captain Sterling Price throughout the war. When Union troops came back in 1865 and the government sold the camels in 1866, sixty-six went to Bethel Coopwood. The camp was abandoned on April 1, 1869.
Hi Jolly left the Army in 1870. His freight line by camel failed, and he turned the animals loose near Gila Bend, Arizona. He became a United States citizen in 1880 and married Gertrudis Serna in Tucson under the name Philip Tedro. In 1885 he drove pack mules for General George Crook's campaign against Geronimo, and the Army turned down his petition for a small pension. He died in Quartzsite around December 16, 1902.
The marker for the Site of Camp Verde stands near the old camp. In Kerrville, the Schreiner Mansion belonged to the man who bought the store beside the post, and the Frontier Times Museum in Bandera was assembled by J. Marvin Hunter, who published Old Camp Verde, The Home of the Camels in 1939.