Hi Jolly Parade and Camelpalooza

On a Saturday morning in January, camels walk south down Moon Mountain Avenue in Quartzsite. Themed floats travel with them, and so does nearly anything else people bring. In 2025, under the theme “Camels Rock,” the line held pets, bicycles, dance and music groups, classic cars and off-road vehicles. Entry is free and open to any group, business or person. The Quartzsite Chamber of Commerce hosts the Hi Jolly Parade each January. It honors Hadji Ali, the camel driver the town knows as Hi Jolly, and the U.S. Army Camel Corps he served. The chamber’s own posts have also called it the Hi Jolly Daze Parade, and the Parker Pioneer wrote Hi Jolly Days.

The 2026 parade started at 10 a.m. on January 10 from north of Kenoyer Street. It ran south to the corner of Moon Mountain Avenue and Main Street. Accounts of the 2025 route differ. The chamber says the parade staged at Moon Mountain and Kenoyer avenues. The Parker Pioneer announced “a new parade route” that staged at Quartzsite Elementary School on Quail Trail and followed Quail Trail to Moon Mountain Road before turning south. Both agree on the finish. In 2025 the parade reached the corner shortly after 10:30 a.m.

Camelpalooza at the Hagely adobe

Where the parade ends, Camelpalooza begins, on the property of the Hagely General Store. The Parker Pioneer called the adobe store one of the oldest structures in Quartzsite, believed to have been built in 1883. The property’s owner, Larry Lord, told the paper he believes the spot was the center of activity in Quartzsite in the late 19th century. He and Daniel Berkey, both local businessmen, are preserving the site. The property was rededicated in January 2024, and Camelpalooza has been held there since that year.

The paper listed camel rides, food vendors, live music and craft booths. In 2025 crafters, product vendors and food vendors filled the grounds, and Rocky Watson, the Jade Street Band and Country Gentlemen Entertainment gave shows. The chamber presents its parade awards here after the parade:

• Best Parade Theme, for a tribute to Hi Jolly and the Camel Corps
• Honoring Our History, for historical accuracy
• Largest Group, for the entry with the most people

The chamber’s two listings for the 2026 festival disagree on its length. One gives January 10 and 11. The other gives three days, January 9 through 11, opening on Friday evening and closing Sunday afternoon.

On April 12, 2025, a monument was dedicated on the corner with the Lost Dutchman Chapter of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus. In its notice, the chamber thanked the chapter “for allowing us to be part of your doings.” The monument honors Anton Hagely and his family, chiefly his son George, a judge known as “The Marrying Judge.” According to camelcorps.org, George Hagely became Quartzsite’s justice of the peace in 1946, at a time when Arizona’s marriage laws drew many couples.

Philip Tedro, Hadji Ali, Hi Jolly

The man the parade honors was born around 1828 and named Philip Tedro. Steve Brown’s 2021 article in AramcoWorld gives his mother as Greek and his father as Syrian, and places the family in Smyrna, now Izmir, in Ottoman Turkey. The Town of Quartzsite calls him a Greek born in Syria. He became a Muslim, made the pilgrimage to Mecca and went by Hadji Ali. By trade he drove and bred camels.

In 1856 a U.S. diplomat, Gwinn Harris Heap, came to Smyrna with money to buy camels for the Army. The purchase was directed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who meant to use camels as pack animals in the desert lands acquired from Mexico. Hadji Ali was one of eight men hired there. He helped buy 33 camels, which were shipped to Texas aboard the USS Supply. The next year the Army hired him full time, and he marched 41 more camels inland to Camp Verde, west of San Antonio. The Texans could not say “Hadji Ali.” They said “Hi Jolly,” and the name stuck.

He went west with 25 camels hauling supplies for Lieutenant Edward Beale’s survey of a wagon road from Fort Defiance, in New Mexico Territory, to the Colorado River. The drivers lived in a shed behind the camel barn, and he and others went on strike at least once over pay. In 1860 he rode the first run of a camel express between Los Angeles and Fort Mojave, so hard that a camel died of exhaustion. The Civil War ended the experiment.

He left the Army in 1870. In 1871, by the Arizona Republic’s account, Germans near Los Angeles held a picnic to celebrate the fall of Paris. Hi Jolly hitched two old camels to a government wagon and drove into the party “with several wild whoops,” stampeding men and teams. The Los Angeles Herald called him “Uncle Sam’s camel-tamer.”

Afterward he hauled freight by camel between the Colorado River and Arizona mines, and he sold water at stagecoach stops from the backs of 25 camels. When the business failed, he turned his camels loose near Gila Bend. The town’s account adds that he prospected, scouted and carried mail for what was called the Jackass Mail. In 1880, in Tucson, he became a citizen and married Gertrudis Serna, taking back the name Philip Tedro. In 1885 he ran pack mules for General George Crook’s campaign against Geronimo. In 1898, in failing health, he went to Tucson and begged Gertrudis to take him back. She refused.

A pyramid at the west end of town

He returned alone to Quartzsite, then a town of about 20 people. The Town of Quartzsite says the place was then called Tyson’s Well. The government rejected his petition for a small military pension. He died on or near December 16, 1902, and neighbors put up a wooden grave marker.

AramcoWorld also tells the legend. On a cold December night in 1902, during a dust storm, an old prospector in a Quartzsite saloon told of a beast outside town with a tongue that glowed like a flame. Hi Jolly took the beast for a camel, asked where it had been seen, said goodbye and went out. Days later he was found half-buried in sand, one arm around a camel’s neck, both dead in the storm. “It was the last time the man known as Hi Jolly was seen alive—or so the legend goes,” Brown writes, and he calls the story almost certainly pure folklore.

The grave is in the pioneer section of the Hi Jolly Cemetery, which the town operates at its western edge, and the town says his grave was the cemetery’s beginning. A stone pyramid topped with a camel stands over it. The town dates the monument to 1934 and credits the Arizona Department of Transportation. AramcoWorld says that in 1935 the Arizona Highway Department placed in it the ashes of Topsy, the last of the government’s camels. The epitaph reads “Cameldriver–Packer–Scout–Over thirty years a faithful aid to the US Government.”

In 1962 the New Christy Minstrels recorded Randy Sparks’s “Hi Jolly, the Camel Driver”: “When the desert moon is bright / He comes ridin’ through the night / Leadin’ four and twenty camels ‘cross the hill.”