Quartzsite

Tyson’s Well on the Ehrenberg-Prescott Road

Quartzsite, in La Paz County, Arizona, grew up around a 40-foot well that served as a watering and resupply point on the old Ehrenberg-Prescott freight and stagecoach route.^2,4 The Arizona Memory Project traces the town to 1856, when Charles Tyson, an early pioneer, set up a stage station and dug several wells for the teamsters hauling freight between Prescott and Ehrenberg.³ A marker at the well gives another date, saying it was dug by hand around 1864 by a miner named Tyson.² Tyson’s homemade “Fort” stood at the center of a small community called Tyson Wells.³ The 1940 state guide says Fort Tyson was built in 1856 and named for Charles Tyson, a settler, and that settlers raised it against the Mojave; it was never a regular army post.¹

Travelers in the 1870’s and 80’s made their first stop here on eastward journeys from the Colorado River, and an early desert guide summed up the place as “No grass, but good water.”⁵ When the railroad came, the stage station fell into ruin and the Tyson Wells post office closed.³

The 1897 Boom and a Misspelled Name

A mining boom in 1897 brought the community back, but postal regulations forced it to take a new name.³ According to the Arizona Memory Project, George Ingersoll suggested Quartzite, after the stone so common in the area, and the Postal Service added the “s” in error.³ The 1940 guide tells the story with a hedge: it is said the name was meant to be Quartzite, and the Post Office Department added the extra letter.¹ A marker records the Oasis Hotel, built between 1899 and 1904 and standing until 1924, a 12-by-40-foot building of station and sleeping rooms.⁴ Near town, Thomas P. Quinn, born in 1869 in New Jersey, worked a mine and dug a cistern to catch water, and its remains served travelers for many years after his death.⁶ In 1940 the guide counted a population of 60 and found stores still keeping scales for weighing gold, where prospectors paid for beans and bacon with pinches of gold dust.¹

Hi Jolly and the Army Camels

Hadji Ali, also called Hi Jolly, was a Syrian camel driver, and Arizona’s camels were an experiment in desert transportation urged by Edward Fitzgerald Beale and authorized by the War Department.^1,7 His marker says he came to this country February 10, 1856.⁸ On the road the camels opened from Fort Defiance across Arizona to the Colorado River, the 1940 guide says, most of the Arab drivers rebelled and Hadji Ali alone stayed.¹ After the Civil War cut the experiment short, he bought a mule and took up prospecting.¹ Camels that slipped away became outcasts of the desert and appeared time and again, singly or in bands, and some were caught and used to pack ore from the mines.¹

He died at Quartzsite on December 16, 1902; his marker puts his birth in Syria about 1828, while the 1940 guide gives about 1845.^1,8 In 1935 the Arizona Highway Department put up a marker at the Last Camp of Hi Jolly in Quartzsite, crediting him with over thirty years as a faithful aid to the US Government.⁸