Essay: The Muslim camel handler who helped chart America’s ‘Mother Road’

Whenever the U.S. is at war in the Middle East, which has not been infrequent in the past two-and-a-half decades, Americans seem unable to resist demonizing Islam. In March, Tennessee Congressman Andrew Ogles insisted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Similar statements have come from the president, Ogles’ colleague Florida Rep. Randy Fine, and the Georgetown University College Republicans, to name a few.

Yet American society and history would look quite different without Muslims. Up to 30% of enslaved persons practiced Islam. That means Muslims quarried and laid the stone for the White House and the Capitol; lent their expertise to rice cultivation in the Carolinas; and likely fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.

Muslims are so American that one played a role in the foundation of the quintessential American highway: U.S. Route 66, which celebrates its centennial this year. His name was Hadji Ali. Or if you prefer the Americanization: “Hi Jolly.”

Ali, whose origins were Arab or Arab and Greek, was raised in Ottoman lands, in present-day Turkey. A camel handler, he led caravans for the Ottomans, which is most likely how he came to employ the honorific “hadji,” by performing the Muslim pilgrimage of Hajj to Mecca.

In the 1850s, the U.S. brought several dozen camel handlers, including Ali, from around the Mediterranean to the Texas coast. His emigration was part of an ambitious U.S. Army plan to use camels to tame the great southwestern American desert after the U.S. acquired the territory in the Mexican American War. The U.S. Camel Corps’ champions were then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and then-acting commander of the Department of Texas Robert E. Lee.

Congress approved spending $30,000 (about $1 million today) to build a camel barn onto a storeship, sail it throughout the Mediterranean, and stock up on camels and cameleers. Sort of a camel-only version of Noah’s Ark.

The trip was not without challenges. Camels were in short supply in Asia and the Middle East — the Ottomans needed them to fight the Crimean War. The Wali of Egypt tried to bait-and-switch the Americans by showing them healthy animals and then giving them sickly ones.

The sea voyage proved turbulent for months on end. And the U.S. government operated with a sense of certainty typical in American exceptionalism. As Major Henry Wayne, who oversaw the project for Davis, put it, “Americans will be able to manage camels not only as well, but better than Arabs, as they do it with more humanity and with far greater intelligence.”

This sentiment led, perhaps, to uncareful vetting of cameleers. Most proved useless and fled upon their arrival to the U.S., presumably to Northern California to prospect for gold.

Ali, however, did not flee. Instead, he arrived at the port of Indianola, Texas, to find his name changed to Hi Jolly; the soldiers could not pronounce Hadji Ali. This, too, feels like a quintessential American experience — for an immigrant at least.

The man at the reins of the Camel Corps, Mexican American War hero-turned-adventurer Edward Fitzgerald Beale, quickly recognized Ali’s camel-whispering expertise, promoting him to lead camel driver. Beale and Ali’s initial task was to chart a trade route from Texas to Southern California.

On June 25, 1857, they set out with a team of 12 wagons, 25 camels, 44 soldiers, 250 sheep, and nearly 100 horses, mules, and dogs from Camp Verde in central Texas. They headed to Fort Tejon, about 80 miles north of Los Angeles.

This journey, too, was not without hardships: The trip took four months and covered 1,200 miles, west from central Texas to Big Bend; north from El Paso to Albuquerque; west across the 35th parallel to Fort Defiance in Navajo territory, through Flagstaff and then on to a major obstacle — crossing the Colorado River near the city now called Needles, California.

Beale had been convinced that camels could not swim — or at least couldn’t swim as well as horses. Ali disabused Beale of this notion by tethering a lead camel to several others and swimming them across the rapid, churning Colorado current in groups of five. Ten mules and two horses drowned in the crossing, but all the camels survived and continued to Fort Tejon.

The expedition proved such a success that Secretary of War John B. Floyd, who succeeded Davis, asked Congress for 1,000 more camels. But by this time, legislators were preoccupied with the looming Civil War.

Hadji Ali and the camels had helped forge what became known first as Beale’s Wagon Road and later the western portion of U.S. Route 66. Established in 1926 as one of the country’s first transcontinental highways, John Steinbeck nicknamed it “Mother Road” in The Grapes of Wrath. Markers and statues in Flagstaff and other cities along the highway still celebrate the camels’ contributions.

The Civil War put an end to many American institutions — including the Camel Corps. Camp Verde fell into Confederate hands, and soldiers found the camels to be nuisances that tended to scare off horses and mules unused to them. In Southern California, however, the Union Army stationed camels at several locations—Camp Latham in present-day Culver City and the Drum Barracks near Long Beach — ready to stamp out secessionist uprisings.

Ali tried valiantly to eke out a life after the Camel Corps. While he did earn a measure of notoriety from his association with the camels, and even married and had several children, he could never earn a steady living nor secure the pension that the Army had promised him. A victim of having been celebrated by the likes of Davis and Lee, he was probably the first Muslim but certainly not the last to serve the U.S. military and then be denied much-needed assistance.

Ali eventually settled alone in a western Arizona town now called Quartzsite. (The 2020 Oscar-winning film Nomadland was partially set there.) He kept himself fed, it seems, by entertaining locals with stories of his adventures. He died penniless in 1902.

Ali’s tomb remains Quartzsite’s most visited tourist attraction. He rests beneath an 8-foot tall, Egyptian-style pyramid commissioned by the state of Arizona three decades after his death. A bronze dromedary rides on top.

While certain members of the current Congress would prefer not to be reminded of Muslim contributions to American society, the people of Quartzsite have not forgotten. For nearly 40 years, the town has held an annual Hi Jolly Daze Parade in Ali’s honor in mid-January. The townsfolk come together, wearing camel hats and camel costumes; they sell camel milk soaps and lotions; they decorate their cars with camel balloons. Some even dress in traditional Arab garb and parade live camels down a main street.

All in honor of one Muslim man who not only found a place in American society but helped build it, too.

Farooq Ahmed is the Muslim American author of the novel Kansastan and is currently writing a novel about Hadji Ali. He lives in Washington, D.C.