Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  Even if the harvest hand managed to nurse his dollars and end the season with a winter stake his troubles were not over. ‘There was still the gauntlet of bootleggers and “tin-horn gamblers” to run. If the stiff managed to escape this parasitic army of harvest camp followers, he was still in danger of being “hijacked” or “rolled” by professional thieves who made a practice of “harvesting the harvesters”. If he made this hurdle, and his stake was intact, he still faced the danger of riding boxcars and of being shot, killed, wounded, or arrested by railroad detectives for stealing rides and encroaching on railway property.’

  To be sure it might reasonably be suggested that with money in his pocket the stiff could have avoided the danger of the boxcars by buying a ticket for his destination and travelling as a legal passenger. Apart from the slenderness of his savings, and a reluctance to part from any of those hard-grafted dollars so tamely, the psychology of the stiff was not such. Tully has a splendid passage where he and a bunch of hobos are riding a mail train from Cedar Rapids toward Omaha.

  At the end of a viaduct the train stops and the entire crew, carrying guns, surround the boxcar and demand money from the hobos. ‘Pay us, or hit the gravel,’ snarls the conductor. ‘We ain’t haulin’ livestock,’ puts in the brakeman. The reply of Bill sums up the anti-activist pride of the hobo: ‘I wouldn’t give you a cent if you hauled me cheap as a letter. It’s against my principles.’

  All the scattered hobo reminiscence still in existence is threaded with this uncertainty. The attitude of train crews varied from company to company, from state to state, from time to time. The experienced hobo carried his own mental inventory of hard-core ‘horstile’ towns and lines; also of the areas, particularly in the Pacific North-West, where crews were likely to be sympathetic to the hobo with an IWW card, perhaps were even Wobs themselves, or sufficiently fellow traveller to help a red card carrier.

  But the crews changed, a new detective would begin a zealous onslaught, or the company itself would temporarily turn on the heat after a case of flagrant theft from a freight, and for a while and on that run the hobo would be given a rough time. He could never be sure: one conductor might amiably let him ride, the next try to squeeze out of him a token fare for his own pocket or toss him overboard or bring in the cops.

  Objectively it can hardly astonish that the railroad companies detested the hobo. They saw him not as a reinless privateer giving their prosaic mercantile steaming a dash of Spanish Main flamboyance, nor as a lame dog to be aided on his way, but as bilker, robber and spoiler. He was also a potential legal bane, for claims by injured men handled by specialist shyster lawyers began to rain in on them. Often the brakeman, out of ferocious sense of duty or because he had failed to extort the standardized private deal ten cents a hundred miles (twenty for an all-night run), would throw the hobo out under the moving wheels. Apart from this death was met and many a limb lopped off while voluntarily leaving or boarding a train.

  The case of W. H. Davies, the Welsh poet, is well known from his account of it in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.Davies spent five years zig-zagging about the goods yards, work camps and jails of the Eastern states and the South, until in March 1899, heading for the Klondyke, he stumbled when snagging a Canadian Pacific train in Ontario and had his right foot severed.

  It was a routine hazard which claimed thousands of men - 23,964 trespassers killed and 25,236 injured on America’s railroads between 1901 and 1905, ‘largely tramps and hoboes’. It was those who were merely crippled who bothered the railroad companies. Feeling themselves to be legal suckers, and also to stamp out boxcar burglary, the companies began appointing armed watchmen. The guard system was pioneered by the redoubtable Pinkerton, who organized for the Rock Island the first exclusive railroad police force.

  Apart from injury claims and theft the railroads had more general reason for abhorring hobos, for they were not too considerate of the property they made use of. If there was anything edible in the boxcar they ate it, anything combustible they burned it.

  Tully describes how on a nippy night a gang of them breaks up some loose bits of wood and proceeds to get warm: ‘Soon a fire was blazing in the car … The men talked in animated fashion while the fire ate its way through the floor and fell on the track below. Another fire was built in an oily spot. It burned slowly at first, while we huddled around it … The blaze spread and crept over the floor and up the sides of the car to the roof.’ Well toasted, they swing off and watch from a safe distance as the train pulls up and the crew extinguishes the fire in the remnant of boxcar.

  A great many illicit train riders were working men getting from A to B, or right through the alphabet, in the only way they could and without causing trouble; but, understandably perhaps, the crews and bulls had no sure means of distinguishing between the harmless and the harmful. The safest, or easiest, principle was to be consistent by treating them all as criminals. Pinkerton’s grand grouping - ‘confirmed tramps, disgusting drunkards, miserable communistic outcasts’ - has remained pretty untrammelled as the railroad detective’s view of the hobo.

  12 The dream cinder dick

  An overland limited

  Chalks a streak of gold

  Across the blackboard of night…

  Prosperity lounges in pullman coaches…

  While American jobless

  Ride the decks, the rods of coaches

  And nurse a great hunger with dreams

  Of wheat cakes and coffee steaming

  On the counter of a coffee-an’ joint

  Somewhere in Omaha, Denver, Colorado Springs.

  Jim Waters:Prosperity

  H. W. Dewhurst’s bulging compendium for ‘cinder dicks’ (the author’s own phrase) describes the railroads of the 1890s as ‘the prime prey of flourishing, well-organized bands of outlaws. Pilferage was rampant. The losses of freight, parcels and luggage were soon to amount to a million dollars. Bridges, tunnels, stations and tracks were dynamited in daring holdups.’

  There might seem here to be a confusion between the career train robber and the nomadic harvest hand, but the author says flatly: ‘The sizeable hobo population, particularly following the Civil War, took to the railroad yards for transportation and loot.’

  This book, intended for the education and delectation of downy-cheeked cinder dicks, contains some rousing, red-blooded yarns, such as that about the sergeant on a routine seal-inspection of merchandise shot through the head at Fayetteville, North Carolina, by a man in an empty gondola, and about another patrolman slain in a boxcar battle at Petersburg, Virginia: both killers were hobos.

  An even more explicit identification of the hobo as both homicidal thug and fanatical political assassin is contained in the Henty-ish code of J. C. Harper, police superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose 1925 pandect of the dream cinder

  dick was: ‘He must be such a man among men as a thoroughbred is among horses. He should be taller than average folk so that he can see over the heads of the crowd. He should be fit and limber as the athlete, have no surplus fat, have good feet, perfect eyes and ears, and be ready any minute to spring after a yeggman, or climb upon a moving freight or passenger train.

  ‘He is to be always neatly dressed, his home life must be above reproach, his wife must not talk too much; he must not take a drink on or off duty; he must have a care in conversation with women; and to cap all, he should possess sufficient strength of character, will power, and moral courage to resist successfully any temptation to do wrong …

  ‘He must be a good shot. He must be able to pick out the trespasser from the brakeman riding the top or bumpers of box cars in the dead of night… He must be able to pick out the “deaf and dumb panhandler” who is “working” the train before he begins to pass his cards…

  ‘He must be ready at all times to walk into a band of car thieves and get the stuffing knocked out of him with a piece of gas pipe, or have some apostle of liberty shoot him from the top of a box car…’

  In pract
ice, the function of the railroad bull seems to have been less lofty and noble than their written manifestos imply. Holbrook summarizes it as ‘to put fear into the hearts of all migrants who rode rods, blinds, bumpers, and decks. They accomplished this in various ways, by tossing tramps off moving trains, by shooting at and sometimes hitting them, by beating them up with fists or saps.’

  He quotes a detective named Hotchkiss, who had a roving commission out of the yards at Portland and Eugene, Oregon, and Oakland, California.

  ‘The best way to keep tramps off trains or other railroad property,’ Hotchkiss explains with radiant simplicity, ‘is to beat up any unauthorized person you find in the yards. I might see a couple of men hanging around. They looked as if they were waiting for a freight to be made up.

  ‘I’d go directly up to them and ask one of them a question. No matter what he answered, I’d cuff him across the face with a good slap. I’d ask the other guy a question. He’d start to back off. I’d follow him up and really hit him.

  ‘Then I’d turn back to the first bo. If he wasn’t already getting the hell out of there, I’d give him the billy - not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to remember.

  ‘On the trains I might talk a while with tramps riding the boxcars, and I’d never throw them off if we were highballing. I’d wait until we were down to twenty miles or so an hour, then force them to jump, or push them off.’

  Hobo jungles ‘made Hotchkiss see red’. He enjoyed nothing more than ‘to devastate a jungle’. His tactics were ‘to drive all the bums out of camp, not giving them time to pick up their bindles and suitcases, or even the food they were preparing. Then the bulls would shoot every cooking utensil full of holes and tear down any small shelter such as a homemade tent or shack. If there was washing hanging on a line, as was often the case, Hotchkiss tore it off and threw it on the jungle fire.’

  This seems to be a candid precis of the policeman’s hobo policy, and indeed toward anyone during depression times without visible means of support.

  But Hotchkiss was Dimples beside Jeff Carr, notorious hobo-stalker and exterminator of Cheyenne, Wyoming, whose name brought the hush of half-admiring awe in jungles throughout the United States. A self-appointed Mountie, Carr’s method was to intercept a slow-moving freight, and gallop beside it on his white horse shooting with his six-gun at hobos on the blinds, decks or in open boxcars, or yanking them off under the wheels. Any who survived were unlikely to last through the manhandling he gave them in the cells. Carr died on duty - killed by a coupling-pin in a fight with hobos.

  In the Thirties the guardians of property were everywhere trigger-twitchy. Kromer, a breadline drifter of that time, is staring in a restaurant window one night; he has not eaten for two days: ‘A hand slaps down on my shoulder. It is a heavy hand. It spins me around in my tracks. “What the hell are you doin’ here?” It is a cop. “Me? Nothing,” I say. “Nothing, only watching a guy eat chicken. Can’t a guy watch another guy eat chicken?” “Wise guy,” he says. “Well, I know what to do with wise guys.” He slaps me across the face with his hand, hard. I fall back against the building. His hands are on the holster by his side. What can I do? Take it is all I can do. He will plug me if I do anything.

  ‘“Put up your hands,” he says. I put up my hands. “Where’s your gat?” he says. “I have no gat,” I say. “I never had a gat in my life.” “That’s what they all say,” he says. He pats my pockets. He don’t find anything. There is a crowd around here now. Everybody wants to see what is going on. They watch him go through my pockets. They think I am a stick-up guy. A hungry stiff stands and watches a guy eat a chicken, and they think he is a stick-up guy. That is a hell of a note.

  ‘“All right,” he says, “get down the street before I run you in. If I ever catch you stemming this beat, I will sap the living hell out of you. Beat it.”’

  However hard the knocks the detectives dealt out, on the railroads themselves they were defeated by numbers. By the railroads’ own estimate around the turn of the century there were at any one time 500,000 hobos beating their way but this, believes Parker, was ‘a fraction of the migratory millions actually in transit’.

  By then the economic impetus was so great behind them, and the habit so infixed, that all the Hotchkisses and Carrs armed with pistols and billies could not keep the hordes off the trains and out of the jungles. The weight of numbers was having another effect, too, which was the accentuating of the double attitude toward the tramp, at one time ‘pesky go-about’ and free man, cadging parasite and romantic reminder of the old boundless horizons officially closed in 1890 by the Census Bureau, when it declared that there was no longer a land frontier. There were few in authority in the cast of Governor Lewelling and not all that many defenders of the tramp even in the Populist farming area - defenders, that is, in humanist and economic terms.

  13 Weary Willy and Tired Tim

  Once a bum always a bum… When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road from Here seems broad and straight and sweet…

  John Steinbeck

  On Columbus Day 1892 every school child in the land sang a special song:

  Humanity’s home! thy sheltering breast

  Gives welcome and room to strangers oppress’d

  Pale children of Hunger and Hatred and Wrong

  Find life in thy freedom and joy in thy song.

  It went without saying that ‘strangers’ in this rejoicing abstraction did not include that everyday reality, the tramp. Yet at the very same time that the tramp was being short-listed for poisoning as communistic vermin, and being smashed off the trains with blackjacks and bullets, the Pinkertonesque ‘happy dog’ myth was waddling off the drawing board.

  The bewildered ex-squaddie, the evicted farmer, the migratory logger, the miner on his uppers, the construction worker hunting his next hiring, the boomer railroad man, the refugee factory hand - all this sinister mob of throw-outs who looked like the canaille advance guard of the Revolution when they came trudging into the town outskirts - were being mingled into a fictional-pictorial composite.

  In his Tired Tim guise he was a harmless, daffy ne’er-do-well, exasperating but pathetic, whom the citizenry could laugh at and feel comfortably superior to. He began to appear in quality periodicals in his folk robes drawn by Frost, as the hoosier cartoon character Weary Willie drawn by Zim in the popular newspapers, and as Happy Hooligan in Opper’s nationally syndicated comic strip.

  He also stepped out of the funnies and into three-dimensional caricature on the stage in the person of the actor Nat Wills, in the by then ceremonial robes of burst hat, shapeless duds, black scrub on jaw and - the signal light of his dissolute booziness, the mark of the beast - the crimson nose. His miserable chattels were in a red bandanna bundle on the end of the stick over his shoulder.

  Perhaps the most powerful popularizer of this comforting image was Norman Rockwell, who for fifty years illustrated the front cover of The Saturday Evening Post (continuing, says his biographer, throughout changes of fashion, to ‘dip his brush into the honey-pot of lovableness and zest in living’). Rockwell introduced his tramp on the front of the 18 October 1924, issue: there he was, complete, straw hat with crown apparently gone round with a can-opener, and corncob pipe jutting through walrus moustache, cooking a couple of sausages impaled on a stick, while from between his legs a lovable mongrel leans forward sniffing hungrily. ‘I always enjoyed doing these tramp pictures,’ Rockwell has said. In the mid-Twenties he produced his famous Fisk Tyre advertisement, an oil painting of a beatific bum (dented derby, patched trousers, flapping boots, daisy jauntily in button-hole) snoring under a billboard upon which a bird is chirruping. Another ad in 1927 for Interwoven Socks showed the same tramp figure (with the same merry pup as companion) pulling some socks out of a garbage can; it had the title StillGood.

  This whimsical local-colour view, composed of both mawkishness and contempt, served the purpose of depersonalizing the hobo, of convenie
ntly disqualifying him from concern and contact. It marked him off as a social curio, as absurd and stylized as Harlequin, and, in human terms, in his grotesque mask just as invisible.

  Hobo numbers continued to fluctuate but in troughs of depression there were by the early 1900s probably more than a million men riding the trains by unorthodox means around the United States. The impact of them upon any one place may be judged by the fact that 500,000 homeless workers steadily billowed through Chicago, America’s railroad axis, from which forty railroads radiated and with 3,000 miles of track within its city limits.

  Now it can seem only to be astonishing legerdemain that numbers of this size could be deleted from society. The incidental literature of the time reveals how it was done: by never looking at the tramp as a person or a social malady, but always side on as a lesson in something or other, either as an example of wayfaring jauntiness, commendably making the best of your rotten lot, or as the wages of sin and inertia.

  The beginning of this pollyanna perkiness may be found in such exhalations as Winter Sunshine, published in the 1880s, by John Burroughs, an earnest nature lover. In a piece entitled ‘Exhilarations of the Road’, Burroughs takes the theme of the charm of the noble urchin. ‘Occasionally on sidewalks’ he confides with fetishist relish, ‘mid dapper, swiftly-moving, high-heeled boots and gaiters, I catch a glimpse of the naked human foot… How primitive and uncivil it looks in such company, a real barbarian in the parlor … Though it be a black foot and an unwashed foot, it shall be exalted. It is a symbol of my order - the Order of the Walkers.’

  It is a trifle surprising to come upon similar sentiments in the reflections of the wrathful Pinkerton. Yet nowhere else is the two-facedness of that age of the ‘tramp menace’ so nakedly revealed. Pinkerton begins by asserting his right to ‘say plain things to the countless toilers’ involved in the Great Strikes of ‘77: ‘I say I have earned this right. I have been all my lifetime a working man. I know what it is to strive and grope along, with paltry remuneration and no encouragement save that of the hope and ambition implanted in every human heart.