CHAPTER 1 

Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had a pet project. But even as the respected chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, he found it difficult to win the support of fellow lawmakers. Davis’s hopes for the idea had been renewed since President Franklin Pierce appointed him secretary of war after his inauguration in 1853. Pierce was known as an innovator, due in part to being the youngest president in history at forty-seven. Davis could certainly see plenty of evidence to support that notion as he buttoned his trousers in the newly renovated bathroom on the second floor of the White House and washed his hands with warm water, made possible by the addition of a hot water furnace that was almost unheard of in most buildings at the time. 

Davis greeted the president warmly as he walked into his private office next to the Cabinet Room on the second floor. 

“Good morning, Mr. President.” 

“Jeff,” Pierce acknowledged, motioning him to sit down at the oak coffee table, in the middle of which sat two china coffee cups and the secretary of war’s recent report to Congress, opened to a page where a passage had been underlined. 

[In the] Department of the Pacific, the means of transportation have, in some instances, been improved, and it is hoped further developments and improvements will still diminish this large item of our army expenditure. In this connection . . . I again invite attention to the advantages to be anticipated from the use of camels and dromedaries for military and other purposes, and for reasons set forth in my last annual report, recommend that an appropriation be made to introduce a small number of the several varieties of this animal, to test their adaptation to our country. . . . 

“Ships of the desert,” said the president, using a common nickname for camels. 

“They drink up to twenty gallons of water at a time, and that hump is twenty pounds of fat that can keep them going for a week in the desert. Find me an army mule that can do that. Camels are ideal for our troops out there in Texas and the New Mexico Territories.” 

President Pierce held up his hand, cutting Davis short. “I like it, and for thirty thousand dollars how can we go wrong?” A year later Congress enacted the Shield Amendment and appropriated “. . . the sum of $30,000 . . . under the direction of the War Department in the purchase and importation of camels and dromedaries to be employed for military purposes.”

Within months, the navy store ship USS Supply, under the command of Lt. David Dixon Porter, loaded the first shipment of camels—nineteen cows and fourteen bulls for which they paid $250 each—from exotic ports in Tunis, Egypt, Turkey, and Malta, along with several dozen handlers to tend them. Among them was a twenty-four-year-old Syrian named Hadji Ali, whom the soldiers nicknamed Hi Jolly for his sunny disposition and occasional pranks, and his sidekick, Mustafa Zarkan. They had a way of cheering the crew up during the storm-tossed, three-month voyage to Indianola, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico 140 miles south of Houston.

Mustafa Zarkan was a burly man with an unusually thick neck for a desert Arab, and he never seemed to tire. He had been a champion wrestler in the Syrian town of Palmyra, something he had kept secret until just the right moment during the voyage. One calm evening about three weeks into the journey, he nailed a sign to a mast announcing a wrestling challenge to “all comers.” Zarkan spoke English fairly well, but he had to let Lt. Porter in on the scheme in order to come up with the right words for the sign. Aloysius Hart, a barrel-chested corporal who had become a friend to both Syrian crewmembers and shown interest in their Muslim faith, was the first to step into the wrestling circle. Within seconds, Zarkan had spun Al around, thrown a headlock on him, and pinned him to the deck. Man after man tried their luck with him, all with pretty much the same outcome. “Zarkan wrestling” became a favorite on the ship, and Mustafa would regularly hold training sessions in which he would instruct the men on the intricacies of grappling. 

Just a few months after their arrival, the army’s experiment began to show promise, with the camels able to tote almost four hundred pounds at four miles an hour without needing anywhere near as much water as horses or pack mules. And the cost of upkeep was far less for camels, which could live on Texas mountain cedar and creosote bush that was indigestible by the other pack animals. Within four years, the US Army and some independent businessmen had imported several thousand more dromedaries to the American West. But they were surly and didn’t get along with horses, characteristics that advocates argued would keep Indians at bay, but which didn’t sit well with the troops. 

The US Camel Corps ultimately failed in part as a result of that ornery disposition and of the cavalry’s affection for horses but mostly due to the onset of the Civil War. In 1867, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ended the costly experiment, concluding that “I cannot ascertain that these have ever been so employed as to be of any advantage to the Military Service.” The remaining camels were auctioned at about $31 each, mostly to circuses, miners, and prospectors. 

Hi Jolly and Mustafa Zarkan eventually arranged marriages with families in Syria, like many of the Arabs involved with the US Camel Corps. And a fair number settled in and around El Paso, which grew to become one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in Texas. Hi Jolly put down roots in Quartzite, Arizona, and Governor Benjamin Moeur dedicated a monument there to him and to the US Camel Corps. In 1935, Moeur unveiled an almost fifteen-foot, pyramid-shaped stack of granite stones with a steel camel silhouetted on top and a plaque inscribed: “The last camp of Hi Jolly, born somewhere in Syria about 1828; died at Quartzite December 16, 1902. Came to this country February 10, 1856. Camel driver—Packer—Scout— over thirty years a faithful aide to the US Government.”