Tag: American Southwest

On a Young Dentist

John Henry was from an established, old southern family. Blond, skinny is a rail, a man so slim that a friend of his in adulthood once said that any 15-year-old could best him easily in a fistfight. John Henry‘s father fought in the Mexican War and then was a major in the Confederate Army leading a group of Georgia volunteers. After his service for the south, the man moved John Henry and the family farther south to Valdosta, Georgia. There, John Henry’s dad became the mayor of the town. His mother passed away of tuberculosis a few months after the move. After receiving his high school education at the Valdosta Institute, John Henry applied for, was accepted by, and then attended dental school at the University of Pennsylvania. He finished his schooling a few months shy of 21 years old. In fact, the university withheld his credentials until his birthday because the law at that time said you had to be 21 to be a dentist. Degree in hand, John Henry turned to Georgia to open his dental practice and get on with life.

It was then that John Henry himself developed tuberculosis. It was a promising dental career cut short really before it ever began. His doctors in Valdosta gave him only a few months to live. However, one doctor suggested that if he would move to a warmer and drier climate, he might buy himself a few months. So, John Henry decided to go west. And, that’s what he did. He ended up spending most of his time out there in New Mexico and Arizona. Sure enough, the dry, warm weather in the American Southwest helped his tuberculosis but only to a point.

You see, he never was able to shake the fits of coughing that the tuberculosis had brought. And the last thing you’d want a dentist to do when he’s working on your mouth is to suffer a coughing fit. There was simply too much scarring on his lungs. They were not going to get better. So, unable to make a living at his chosen profession, John Henry decided to become a professional gambler. He also made money working as a dealer in gambling houses and in bars. Now, at that time, being a professional gambler was not a disreputable occupation. Not everybody could make a living at it. In fact, John Henry was quite good at gambling. It was said that he was a very difficult man to read. You couldn’t tell if he had a good hand or a bad one. And that’s important in poker.

John Henry also developed a reputation for having a short temper. Some people said it was because he was a southerner. However, more than likely, his pride simply did not like the way people reacted to him when he won at poker. Because he often won at the gambling tables, it was not uncommon for people to accuse him of cheating. John Henry did not take that lightly. According to sources who were there, John Henry left a string of injured, bruised, and, occasionally, dead men who accused him of cheating across several gambling parlors in the American Southwest.

He also found love out west. It was a girl named Mary Katharine. Truth be told, Mary Katherine made her living as a prostitute. However, she was well educated and turned to prostitution because, as she told John Henry, the work gave her a sense of power and control over her own life and destiny–something women at the time didn’t have much of. The two were pretty much intellectual equals, and, although the relationship was marked by sometimes vicious fights, they were devoted to each other for several years.

But, tuberculosis finally got the best of John Henry. Mary Katharine took care of him as he wasted away. On his deathbed, she reported that he looked down at his bootless feet and chuckled. “I never thought I would die with my boots off,” he said with a cough. He succumbed to the tuberculosis at the young age of 36.

Today, he is remembered for his prowess at gambling, and for his temper, and for his friendships with western legends Bat Masterson and the Earp brothers. He has been the subject of books and films, his character being portrayed dozens of times on TV and on the big screen. Of course, in real life, his friends didn’t know him as John Henry.

Because he had that dental degree everyone just called him Doc Holliday.

On an Imported Worker

The small Arizona town of Quartzsite is home to a remarkable grave. The stone says the body buried beneath it is someone called “Hi Jolly,” but that’s a remnant of the racist nature of the United States 150+ years ago. We’ll look at his name in a moment, but how this man came to live and eventually die in the American Southwest is as odd as it is interesting.

The man’s name was actually Hadji Ali, but it’s easy to see that someone in the United States back in the mid-1800s might hear that name as “Hi Jolly.” So, to make his life somewhat easier, he want by the name that the locals in Arizona called him. From what we can glean he was born in what is now Turkey to Greek Orthodox shepherd parents in the 1820s. His Greek name was Philip Tedro. But, at an early age, Ali converted to Islam and changed his name. Because he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca early in this religious journey, he chose the name Hadji. He also served in the French Army as a young man, fighting part of the French colonial wars in Algeria. His background with animals saw him assigned to care for the pack animals used in by the French in their supply lines.

It was in this capacity that Ali was hired by, of all outfits, the United States military. How that happened has to be explained. You see, in the presidential administration of Franklin Pierce, the Secretary of War (what the Secretary of Defense was known as at that time) was none other than Mississippi’s own Jefferson Davis. This is the same Davis would would go on to become the President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. Since there were no real foreign threats to the US during this time, the major focus of American defense policy was the pacification (meaning removal and/or eradication) of the native residents of the vast stretches of the western US. Davis looked for ways of creating better supply chains for the string of forts the army had set up to protect Americans from what they felt were native threats to settlement. That’s why Davis sent American agents to the Middle East to find and hire the best animal wranglers and handlers money could buy–people who had experience in handling animals in harsh, desert conditions. Ali was one of several hires made by Davis’s agents, and he came to the US in 1856 and arrived in Texas before making their way to the Southwest.

Ali was appointed to be the leader of these animal handlers. Everyone who worked with him commented on his professionalism and experience. As a vital member of the army’s quartermaster corps, he began enacting the plan Davis created to supply the forts and, at first, all seemed well. But 1857 saw the start of a different presidential administration and a new Secretary of War who didn’t have the priorities that Davis did. Besides, the tensions surrounding the beginnings of the American Civil War began to divert government funds from the western theater to the creation of warehouses and armories back east that began stocking supplies and weaponry. Soon, Ali found himself out of a job and unable to return to his native lands.

So, he decided to stay. He married a Greek girl in Arizona and did more supply work for the army in the wars against native groups in the late 1800s. He did some prospecting as well. He and his wife raised two children. Finally, he died in 1902, having never returned home. In fact, Ali became an American citizen and came to love the beauty and freedom of the deserts of Arizona.

You might be wondering why Jefferson Davis would have to send away to the middle east to find people to manage pack animals in the American Southwest. Well, that was needed because no one in the United States had any experience working with the specific pack animal Davis was using in the deserts in an interesting although failed experiment.

Ali, you see, had a good deal of experience working with camels.