In 1914, the International Workers of the World (IWW) journal, Solidarity, referred to the itinerant workers of the West as “half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer.” This description continues to ring true a century later.Footnote 1 Itinerant laborers were essential to the industrial capitalism that characterized the American economy between the Civil War and the 1920s. They were particularly important in the West, where they provided the labor for the region's natural resource extraction industries and constructed much of the infrastructure necessary to exploit those resources. Jobs in these industries—including agriculture, mining, logging, construction, fishing, and cannery work—were irregular and seasonal, and they demanded a mobile workforce. During these decades, periodic recessions and volatile western labor markets forced men to travel widely in search of work. In 1910, there were an estimated 3.5 million itinerant workers in the United States, and California alone was home to some 175,000 such casual workers.Footnote 2 These men were known by a variety of terms including tramps, hoboes, bindle-stiffs, and floaters. Despite their essential economic roles, they were widely scorned as the lowest of workers, and vagrancy laws criminalized much of the mobility that their jobs demanded.
The seasonal nature of resource extraction industries meant that workers congregated in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other western cities during winter months of low employment. As seasonal urban residents, itinerant workers linked western cities to the regional extractive industries that supported those cities both ecologically and economically. As environmental historian David Igler has written, workers in resource extraction industries “understood not only the relationship between labor and capital but also the connections between hinterland production and city markets.”Footnote 3 They understood these relationships because they lived them, traveling between countryside and city, from a job picking fruit or cutting down trees to another at a cannery or construction site. Integrating the stories of the resource networks that supported western cities and the working people whose labor drove resource exploitation, and with it both urban growth and trade, expands on William Cronon's analysis in Nature's Metropolis by uncovering the human experience of workers who labored in industries that linked city and countryside.Footnote 4
In both their work and their travel, these itinerant workers viscerally experienced outdoor living and the vagaries of climate during an era when the country was becoming increasingly urban and industrial. As middle- and upper-class Americans worried about a loss of contact with nature, itinerant laborers remained well aware that their lives were embedded in nature, for better or worse. As Nels Anderson, a hobo turned sociologist, succinctly explained, “life and work in the open, so conducive to health on bright, warm days, involves exposure in cold and stormy weather.”Footnote 5 As Anderson suggested, to describe the lives of migrant laborers as close to nature is not to romanticize them. Most hoboes experienced privation, hardship, uncertainty, and danger, and this set them apart from participants in the “back to nature” movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States.Footnote 6 However, Anderson's reference to the health benefits of time spent outdoors reflected part of the mindset behind such movements, and the contradictions in his phrasing suggest that hoboes' encounters with nature were anything but simple. I argue that at least some hoboes embraced time spent in “wild” nature as an escape from work, and they consciously asserted their ability to appreciate nature in the face of claims that such appreciation was class specific. As workers and as travelers, itinerant laborers experienced and knew nature in ways that reflected both their distinct circumstances as mobile industrial wage workers and the cultural context of a national obsession with nonhuman nature.
California—home to the West's greatest urban centers, its most substantial industrial development, and its most intensive agriculture—occupies the center of this story. The attractions of California's jobs and cities made the state the major hub for western itinerant laborers, but their mobility meant that they crossed state (and regional) boundaries on a regular basis. This article will follow its subjects to the forests and fields of the Pacific Northwest and the mines of the Rockies. As an increasingly urban and industrial place, California exemplified trends shaping development throughout the region, and the Golden State thus represents an appropriate center point for this analysis of itinerant laborers' relationship to nature.
Temporally, this article focuses on the decades from 1890 to 1920. The depression of 1893 left thousands of men out of work in San Francisco and other western cities. Desperate, they sought any available work in the countryside, increasing the flow of workers between city and country and taking advantage of the region's rapidly expanding rail network to chase employment wherever they could find it. The hard times of the 1890s also sparked new political mobilizations among the unemployed, including a march from California to Washington by 1,500 men calling themselves the Industrial Army of the Unemployed (and including a young tramp named Jack London).Footnote 7 Political mobilizations incorporating itinerant laborers remained sporadic and largely confined to particular industries such as mining until the IWW, founded in 1905, turned its attention to organizing unskilled laborers in the West. Although the Wobblies' efforts to organize migratory laborers seemed to be making progress over the next decade, the onset of the First World War led to a crackdown on radicalism that brought an abrupt end to the heyday of the IWW. Other changes in the aftermath of the war and in the 1920s altered the social and economic circumstances of workers in resource extraction industries. Agriculture employed growing numbers of migrants from Mexico, displacing the hoboes who had worked on the harvest in California and throughout the West. The increasing affordability of the automobile transformed the mobility of workers in pursuit of both employment and recreation. Thus, the decades from roughly 1890 to 1920 represented a distinct period in which hoboes played a crucial part in the extractive economy of the American West while developing a unique, oppositional subculture.
That colorful subculture of hoboes has sparked a number of recent histories. Among the most notable, Todd DePastino's Citizen Hobo situates the hobo in a longer social and cultural history of homelessness in the United States. Frank Tobias Higbie's Indispensable Outcasts focuses on migrant workers in the Midwest as central to progressive era debates over economic and cultural changes. He explores the shifting social meanings of seasonal labor and how laborers negotiated tensions over class, citizenship, and manhood. Mark Wyman's Hoboes analyzes harvest workers in the West from the 1870s to the 1920s as central to the development of agriculture in the region.Footnote 8 The IWW and its attempts to organize migratory laborers have also been the focus of a number of works by labor historians, who have recounted the dramatic battles over free speech and working conditions in western towns like Wheatland, Everett, and Butte and placed them in the contexts of western economic development and American radicalism. However, despite the number of works that consider the history of the West's itinerant laborers during this period, none has employed an environmental history analysis to focus on their relationship to nature.Footnote 9
Environmental historians have increasingly foregrounded the experiences of non-elites and challenged an earlier narrative that situated working-class people in opposition to changing environmental consciousness in the modern United States. In 1976, Roderick Nash wrote, “All the nineteenth-century champions of wilderness appreciation … were products of either urban Eastern situations or of one of the West's most sophisticated cities, such as San Francisco. Lumbermen, miners, and professional hunters … lived too close to nature to appreciate it for other than its economic value as raw material.”Footnote 10 This dichotomy between elites who appreciated wilderness and workers who saw natural resources only in economic terms oversimplified the views of both groups. More recent histories of both urban workers and rural people emphasize the contradictions within conservation. For example, Chad Montrie's Making a Living and Lawrence Lipin's Workers and the Wild explore the complex ways in which working-class Americans related to nature as industrial capitalism transformed their work lives and material circumstances. Karl Jacoby's Crimes Against Nature considers how local people who lived within or near newly established parks, including Native Americans and white hunters, conceptualized nature and their labor in it. In Common Lands, Common People, Richard Judd traces the influence of rural New Englanders on conservationist thinking, showing how conservation drew on eclectic, grass-roots elements as well as the elite and scientific discourses highlighted by most histories of the movement. Footnote 11
These historians are among several who have answered Richard White's call for environmental historians to “reexamine the connections between work and nature.” White analyzes how modern environmentalism distinguishes between leisure and work as ways of encountering nature, writing that, “Environmentalists stress the eye over the hand, the contemplative over the active, the supposedly undisturbed over the connected.” In contrast, he argues that humans have historically known and understood nature through their labor. In The Organic Machine, White defines human labor in terms of energy, thereby emphasizing how all human activity is part of nature.Footnote 12 However, as Gunther Peck has noted, in blurring the boundaries between work and play, White's broad definition of human labor obscures political differences between the two.Footnote 13 In his study of miners in Colorado, Killing for Coal, Thomas Andrews shows how their “workscape,” which encompassed both material realities and cultural perceptions, shaped the “lived experience, identity, and politics” of mineworkers and demonstrated the impossibility of separating nature and culture.Footnote 14 Kathryn Morse's The Nature of Gold argues that Klondike gold miners remained embedded in the industrial society that facilitated their explorations even as they moved between “a fierce, physical, seemingly preindustrial engagement” with the natural world and the mediated, hidden connections characteristic of modern, industrial society. These and other histories have begun to uncover the complex ways in which labor both shaped and was shaped by natural and cultural contexts.Footnote 15
This study of itinerant laborers adds another layer to environmental historians' efforts to elucidate working-class attitudes toward nature and historical relationships between nature and labor. Both Jacoby's and Judd's subjects were defined in part by their rootedness in place (whether real or imagined). In contrast, itinerant laborers defy attempts to classify them. They possessed a degree of mobility usually associated with modernity while remaining tied to work in nature and its cycles of seasonal change in ways usually associated with preindustrial labor. Itinerant laborers also moved constantly between rural and urban settings, making them impossible to categorize as residents of one or the other. Finally, hoboes worked largely outside the purview of organized labor, and their use of nature as a site of recreation predated the growing popularity of working-class outdoor recreation movements beginning in the 1920s.Footnote 16
Itinerant laborers clearly distinguished between work and other exertions of energy, such as walking through the landscape or “beating” a train. Work involved a loss of independence, whereas leaving a job, choosing one's next destination, and even the process of getting there represented an assertion of agency and, often, a challenge to the norms of industrial capitalism. The freedom of traveling through nature, even with its hardships, displaced work as the focus of narratives, and descriptions in itinerants' writings reflected an appreciation of nature for its beauty and as an alternative to work.
In short, itinerant laborers reflected and represented many of the contradictions of this transitional period of both industrialization and changing ideas about the natural environment. In a single year (perhaps even in a single week or month), a hobo was an urban dweller, a rural worker, and a traveler, a laborer and a man of both poverty and leisure. He experienced the worst squalor of city living. He pitted his muscle and will against nature to extract its resources, well aware that in doing so he contributed far more to the wealth of others than to his own prosperity. And he traveled through nature in all its harshness and beauty. Itinerant workers did know nature through their labor, but they also appreciated the beauty of nature as observers. As IWW songwriter Dick Brazier said of life as a western hobo,
There was plenty of room to move around in, and there were scenes of great grandeur and beauty, and there were journeys to be made that took you to all kinds of interesting sections of the country. … I think that's one of the reasons we kept on moving as much as we did. In addition to searching for the job, we were also searching for something to satisfy our emotional desire for grandeur and beauty. After all, we have a concept of beauty too, although we were only migratory workers.Footnote 17
Itinerant laborers like Brazier drew clear distinctions between leisure and work, and they claimed a right of leisure time and space for themselves, using natural places and cities as sites of both work and recreation. Rather than slot nature into one category or the other, they accepted the presence of nature within both spheres, and they used both hand and eye to know nature.
Hobo Literature and Labels
One of the difficulties in studying the history of working-class people in general and itinerant laborers in particular is, of course, the limits of available sources. First-hand accounts by hoboes and men who worked in resource extraction industries include memoirs, oral histories, and fictionalized narratives. Tramps were storytellers, and some used print to formalize the tales that they told when begging for charity or whiling away the hours in a railroad car. As the historian Ann Fabian notes of other working-class “true stories,” the accounts of hoboes bore witness to the authors' experiences. Tramp writers described and commented on the economic conditions that they experienced, and they claimed authority, as well as a little cash, for themselves in the process. Such sources must, of course, be recognized as narratives constructed with audience reactions in mind. Tramp narratives often followed traditions of picaresque fiction and tales of the open road. They also embraced prevailing narratives of the conquest of the West and the closing of the frontier. But even when mediated through literary conventions, first-hand accounts convey some of the lived experiences of hoboes, and they reveal how these outsiders engaged with the cultural norms of the period, sometimes conforming to them and sometimes challenging them.Footnote 18
Political statements by and about itinerant laborers were published in pamphlet form and appeared in labor newspapers during this era. These sources often describe working and living conditions, and they also offer a window into the political ideas of itinerant workers, particularly as the IWW became increasingly active organizing western workers after 1906. All writings by and about hoboes, not just those that appear explicitly political, were filtered through a lens of class analysis and critique. Both as flesh-and-blood individuals and as cultural symbols, tramps and hoboes were at the center of attempts to come to terms with the class divisions of American society in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
These attempts included a number of studies by social scientists and reformers attempting to understand problems of unemployment and homelessness. Although the biases of the men and women conducting them inevitably shaped these studies, they nevertheless provide useful information about populations of itinerant and unemployed men. Some men conducted “participant-observer” studies in which they joined the laboring classes, either out of youthful curiosity, as in the case of Walter A. Wyckoff, or as part of an organized investigation, as with F.C. Mills. These men shared many of the experiences of itinerant laborers during their investigations, and they also described their observations of the men with whom they interacted at work and on the road.Footnote 19 Although all of these sources have limitations, together they provide a window into the lives of itinerant laborers during these decades.
Hoboes were almost entirely male and primarily white, although in some industries in the West they found themselves working alongside people of Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, East Indian, or Native American descent.Footnote 20 A 1913–1914 study of migratory farm laborers in California found that half were natives of the United States and half were foreign-born immigrants, and other studies of vagrants generally agreed that at least half were native-born Americans. They came from a wide variety of backgrounds, and almost all were literate, although the percentage with college educations was low.Footnote 21 Many accounts describe itinerant workers as avid readers of both local newspapers and labor publications. IWW halls contained extensive libraries, and radical bookstores also circulated literature among hoboes. Jack London's writings were particularly popular, and in the early twentieth century his Call of the Wild and White Fang contributed to an explosion of wilderness novels on national bestseller lists.Footnote 22 As their literary interests suggest, tramps who wrote about their experiences were outliers, but they were not as far removed from the majority of the itinerant population as one might expect. The hobo subculture was oppositional, but it was not disengaged from prevailing cultural trends and debates in the United States, including those about nature.
The anarchist and hobo Ben Reitman famously said, “The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders, and the bum drinks and wanders.”Footnote 23 Both outsiders studying itinerant laborers and the men themselves were very much concerned with labeling and classifying unemployed men and wanderers. Tramp subculture incorporated distinct labels based on factors such as age, experience, and work habits. For example, in the West, the term “bindle-stiff” referred specifically to a working tramp, a man who moved around the region from job to job carrying his role of blankets on his back. However, many observers noted the difficulty of distinguishing between those who were down-and-out because of economic or seasonal cycles and tramps who they saw as a criminal element. As the social reformer Edmond Kelly put it in 1908, “the question of the tramp cannot be separated from that of the unemployed for vicious tramps often masquerade as unemployed and innocent unemployed after a few weeks' tramping cannot be distinguished from tramps.”Footnote 24 The confusion inherent in Kelly's statement reflected the difficulty of labeling men with complex motivations and personal histories.
In fact, these categories of men overlapped greatly and their shared characteristics outweighed their differences. The line between “skilled” and “unskilled” laborers, both in cities and in rural resource extraction industries, was fluid. Men went where the jobs were (or tried to), and most had no qualms about claiming to possess the necessary skills to fill any decent, available job. Periods of unemployment based on seasonal and economic cycles characterized the experiences of many, if not most, working-class people in the West during these decades. Not only were agriculture, mining, timber, and fishing seasonal, but urban industries also operated seasonally, leaving tens of thousands of men and women unemployed through the winter months. For example, in San Francisco, industrial employers routinely cut their work forces by one-fourth during the months of January through March.Footnote 25 Even skilled laborers, such as carpenters, regularly found themselves without work in their trades and joined the pool of unskilled laborers to make ends meet. Recurrent recessions exacerbated these conditions for workers of all kinds.Footnote 26 In fact, the precarious nature of the division between respectable workers and itinerants scorned for their inability to find steady work helps explain the concern with defining and categorizing the unemployed and homeless. This emphasis on self or group differentiation reflected the permeability of boundaries within the working classes. The transience and uncertainty that characterized the lives of itinerant laborers was all too familiar to more respectable working-class Americans, and this only made hoboes and the marginal status they represented more threatening.
The term “tramp” possessed intriguing multiple meanings during this period, even as it competed with other terms such as “hobo” as the label of choice. As DePastino notes, the term “tramping” once referenced the travels of a journeyman from job to job as he gained experience in his chosen trade.Footnote 27 The term also continued to denote a trip to and through natural areas for leisure purposes. In the 1880s, a group of well-off Oakland residents called the Merry Tramps engaged in recreational camping trips around the Bay Area. In this era of “back to nature” movements and recreational sojourns to view sublime nature or engage in big-game hunting, the Merry Tramps joined many groups and individuals, such as John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, in promoting travel to “wild” nature. Thomas Dykes Beasley, who walked across California mining country in 1914 for reasons of leisure and literature, not only referred to both himself and his trip by the term “tramp” but also expressed sympathy and fellowship with hoboes whom he encountered. Even Muir used the term, reflecting that he “chose to become a tramp” rather than pursue wealth in a more settled occupation than that of wilderness advocate.Footnote 28 The multiple meanings of “tramp” from vagrant to walking excursion coexisted from at least the late eighteenth century into the late nineteenth and early twentieth.Footnote 29 The interplay of concepts of travel, work, leisure, and nature in the multiple meanings of the term reflects the complexity of the ways in which itinerant laborers in the American West perceived and experienced their place in the region's environment, economy, and culture.
Motivations for Tramping
Both observers of itinerant workers and hobo authors themselves debated the primary factor motivating their mobility. Economic circumstances certainly played a major role. For example, F.C. Mills noted that “the whip of economic necessity” was far more important than “love of adventure.”Footnote 30 However, writings of and about tramps often emphasized psychological motivations, rather than economic ones. The concept of “Wanderlust,” often capitalized as though it were a force beyond conscious control, appeared repeatedly. Wanderlust was sometimes seen as a psychological flaw—the social reformer Alice Solenberger referred to extreme cases as “half insane victims of restlessness”—and sometimes as a natural drive tied to the seasons. Andress Floyd wrote of how “the Spirit of Wanderlust seizes all the World in the early days of Spring” and compared hoboes taking to the road to both millionaires moving to their country homes and the spring migrations of robins.Footnote 31 These discussions revealed a tension over whether a desire to wander, with its rejection of a stable home life anchored in a single place, represented an illness that needed to be eradicated or an instinct that was a “natural” response, either a drive that existed within all people or an understandable adaptation to economic conditions.
Some hoboes identified their motivation as a love of the road and a need for variety, and they connected these impulses implicitly or explicitly to a desire to explore and experience nature. Leon Ray Livingston, who published a dozen books about his life as tramp A-No. 1, wrote of how “Scenery Tramps” were “absolutely restless” men who “crave[d] only a constant change of scenery.” Similarly, Beasley emphasized that “sheer love of the road—and only a tramp knows what those words mean” kept men moving, and he linked that desire for travel to an appreciation for “the beauty of Nature” that not all people possessed.Footnote 32 In their 1918 study of farm labor in California, the reformers R.L. Adams and T.R. Kelly observed, “The average worker aims to enjoy life. He goes to the redwoods, in the high Sierras, and to the coast during the heat of summer, he travels to southern California for the rainy season.” They explicitly noted that itinerants made choices about where to travel and where to seek work, based on knowledge of both employment opportunities and environmental conditions.Footnote 33
Restlessness or wanderlust could also represent a proletarian's rejection of the drudgery of work. Beasley referred to the hobo as “an idealist” who sought “freedom from the shackles of convention and the ‘Gradgrind’ methods of an utilitarian and materialistic age.”Footnote 34 Both specific working conditions and the general characteristics of labor for unskilled men were often cited as reasons why itinerant laborers rejected steady employment. Jack London described such motivation in his own experience of going “on the road” as a teenager. He became a tramp because of “the wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest” but also “because I hadn't the price of the railroad fare in my jeans” and “because I was so made that I couldn't work all my life on ‘one same shift.’” For London, like many hoboes, the desire to travel and the quest for diverse experiences combined with the economic circumstances of poverty and the monotony of available work to draw him into tramp life.Footnote 35
Walter Wyckoff, who in contrast to London presented himself as a worker rather than a hobo during his stint on the road, also emphasized the appeal of variety. After a forty mile walk one day, he wrote, “Setting down to work would now be a welcome change … just as I always found the life of the road a grateful relief, at first, from the strain of heavy labor.”Footnote 36 Wyckoff's pattern of mixing intervals of travel, work, and unemployment was typical of itinerant laborers in this era. Often the end of a job or the inability to secure one forced this mobility, but laborers also chose to move on from a job or place. Men remained employed with the Southern Pacific an average of only 8.6 days, and one study of railroad construction found 75 percent turnover every ten days. On average, harvesters worked for only seven days before collecting their pay and moving on, canners for thirty days, and miners for sixty days. Carleton Parker found that 73 percent of the men he surveyed reported that their last job had been in a different locality, 21 percent of them in another state. Just over one-third of workers had left voluntarily.Footnote 37
Hoboes were not alone among working-class men in seeking alternatives to the monotony of wage labor during this era. Jacoby describes how poachers in the Yellowstone area in the early twentieth century contrasted the relative freedom and independence of poaching with “the dependency and time discipline of the workplace.” They perceived poaching and work as opposing categories despite the fact that poaching required physical effort and served as a source of income.Footnote 38 Native Americans throughout the West and Mexican Americans in the Southwest also practiced irregular participation in wage labor, incorporating it into older subsistence cycles that entailed seasonal mobility.Footnote 39 Elsewhere in the country, Montrie found a similar pattern of selective participation in wage labor among Appalachian miner-farmers, as well as resistance to labor through “vagrancy” on the part of African-Americans in the South.Footnote 40 Thus, itinerant laborers were by no means unique in their rejection of consistent employment for wages, but their cultural visibility and their status as white men caused their departure from American norms to stand out. Hoboes' travel became both a means of escape and a transgression against settled community life and work norms. That travel also took them out of cities and rural settlements and into closer contact with first nature.
Traveling Through Nature
Itinerants' descriptions of life on the road combined elements of hardship, adventure, and leisure. Livingston opened his 1910 Life and Adventures of A-No. 1 with a warning addressed to “every young man and boy” who might be attracted by his adventures. He wrote, “For each mile of beautiful scenery and food in plenty, there are many weary miles of hard walking with no food or even water—through mountain gorges and over parched deserts; for each warm summer night, there are ten bitter-cold, long winter nights.”Footnote 41 This disclaimer served to reassure respectable readers that Livingston did not intend to recruit boys to tramp life, but it also highlighted the role that nature played in the narrative, both as scenery and as the source of hardship and challenges. Nature—the weather, the land, the availability of food and fuel—shaped the experiences of itinerant workers, particularly when they were on the move.
Tramp narratives often emphasized the hardships and difficulties of traveling through the landscape, removed from the comforts of civilization. London described a winter trip through the Nevada desert:
Snow lay here and there on the level, all the mountains were shrouded in white, and at night the most miserable wind imaginable blew off from them. It was not a land in which to linger. And remember, gentle reader, the hobo goes through such a land, without shelter, without money, … and sleeping at night without blankets.Footnote 42
This was not a landscape of leisure and recreation. The descriptions of scenery were balanced with “the most miserable wind,” and the hobo lacked even the most basic protections against the harshness of the winter environment. Both while traveling and while sojourning in “jungles”—the telling term for the gatherings of hoboes that developed in cities and near railroad depots—itinerant laborers often slept on the ground with at best a thin blanket to insulate them from the elements. As the self-described tramp Andrew Saunders wrote, “When you read a poet yearning to go back to the Simple Life and live close to Nature, sleeping on the ground as did the simple shepherds in the days of old, you can gamble he was never on the hobo.”Footnote 43 With these words, Saunders challenged nature writers who promoted the “simple life” with no recognition of its hardships. American culture, however, also provided tramps with a way to assign value to their rough encounters with nature. Negotiating hardships enhanced strength and vitality, granted virtue, and reinforced masculinity and independence even as the experience of industrial wage labor undermined those characteristics. Prevailing ideas about nature thus appealed to hoboes even as they questioned the wisdom of nature's “poets.”
Traveling hoboes took advantage of any available resources. During a trip through the Santa Clara Valley in the mid-1890s, the socialist Morrison I. Swift described how “along every country road, under almost every tree … there were the ashes of little camp fires where food was heated, and the banks of every stream appeared like a much-used lodging house.”Footnote 44 The hobo A.W. Dragostedt also emphasized the importance of nearby natural resources, describing a jungle located “on the edge of a strip of timber” where “a stream fed from a spring runs into the lake nearby.”Footnote 45 Hoboes obtained food by hunting, fishing, or stealing from orchards (as well as begging), and they gathered fuel from forests. Irving Hanson remembered “liv[ing] off rabbits, thanks to our .22 rifle,” when he and a friend struggled to find work as miners in 1912.Footnote 46 A tree, a haystack, or any unoccupied structure could provide shelter for hoboes on the move. But itinerant laborers could never truly escape the industrial world, of course. Even when their meals consisted of animals that they had hunted and cooked over a fire, their utensils included old tin cans and they supplemented the meal with other foodstuffs purchased or begged from a nearby town. The remainder of Dragostedt's description of his jungle highlights this. Empty boxcars provided “protection against rain and a place to sleep,” and the gathering place was located half a mile from a railroad junction and two miles from a small town. Thus, the resources of nature were not the only resources that itinerant laborers depended on. They also depended on the resources of industrial society, from its towns and cities to its railroad network.Footnote 47
The intimate connection between hoboes and railroads perhaps most clearly demonstrates the complexity of hoboes' relationships with industrial capitalism. The railroad was an essential method of travel for hoboes, particularly across the vast distances of the West. As one railroad official noted, “Hundreds of idle men infest empty cars on the Great Northern during the summer months.”Footnote 48 In 1908, the Interstate Commerce Commission estimated that 47,000 men had been killed in the previous decade trying to illegally ride the rails, a statistic that provides a sense of the ubiquity of rail travel as well as its dangers.Footnote 49 At times, the railroads provided both employment and transportation, and itinerant laborers expressed ambivalence about the companies. When Hayes Perkins was searching for work in the Pacific Northwest in 1898, he said of the railroads: “They beat us and we beat them, is the rule.” This simple statement balanced the harsh conditions of labor at track construction and upkeep with the itinerants' exploitation of the railroads for free transportation, referred to as “beating.” A few months later, Perkins disavowed such illegal travel, stating, “It is too much hard work and danger.”Footnote 50
That very hard work and danger offered an element of adventure that appealed to many hoboes, however. London felt a “thrill of pride” that “the overland has stopped twice for me … a poor hobo on the bum” as conductors tried to prevent him from illegally boarding a train. “I alone have twice stopped the overland with its many passengers and coaches, its government mail, and its two thousand steam horses straining in the engine,” he boasted.Footnote 51 Hobo narratives often included detailed accounts of the skill, physical prowess, and sheer daring needed to ride the rails, and hoboes took great pride in their successes.
Railroads allowed hoboes to move through space at the pace of modern industrial society, and in turn, itinerant labor played a crucial role in building and maintaining railroads throughout the West. In riding the rails and working on the tracks, hoboes remained enmeshed in industrial society. However, many hoboes prided themselves on never paying for a railroad ticket, an action that was part economic necessity and part protest against the capitalist economy that exploited their labor. Thus, hoboes were not exactly consumers of the railroad in the literal sense. They sought to take advantage of the technologies of industrial society while resisting full incorporation, and they were more likely to employ a language of conquest to describe their success in dodging railroad employees and catching a train than to ascribe a rhetoric of conquest to their encounters with nature while on the road. They survived nature, but they beat the railroad.
Observing Nature on the Road
A thread of appreciation of nature runs through tramp narratives alongside descriptions of harsh conditions, and these accounts challenged a simple division between working-class and middle-class experiences of nature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Narratives by tramps often juxtaposed the appeal of natural beauty with more practical observations. Perkins referred to the beauty of “waterfalls tumbl[ing] over the steep cliffs” during a trip along an Oregon river, but in other diary entries, he focused more on the potential utility of the land for farming, grazing, timber, and mining than on aesthetic considerations.Footnote 52 Similarly, “the varied beauty of the West Coast” impressed the Wobbly Ralph Chaplin during a stint as a harvest worker. He felt nostalgia for “the mountains and streams of Washington state and Oregon” and reminisced about “the quiet golden loveliness of California's hills.” But Chaplin also missed “the smell of wood smoke and lumber in quaint tidewater towns,” showing that his memories linked “wild” nature with settlements enmeshed in the industries of the region rather than separating the two.Footnote 53 J.K. O'Connor described the transcendent beauty of a sunset at Redondo Beach—“never had I dreamed of such a marvel of beauty as the combination of water, earth, sun and sky”—but he also noted that his appreciation of the sight might have been enhanced by the promise of employment in the lumber-yard of the Willamette Valley Lumber and Improvement Company the next day. Later in O'Connor's narrative, the view of the Golden Gate “utterly eclipsed” even that Redondo Beach sunset and “was of such a sublime nature that even now I dare not ‘rush in, where angels fear to tread.’” O'Connor's prose employed references to the sublime and religious allusions not unlike those of John Muir, but at least for O'Connor, the tramp's life left little room for contemplation: “But all such visions must fade before stern reality, and onward I felt compelled to trudge.”Footnote 54
Hoboes did not possess an innocent or instinctive appreciation for nature. Casual references indicate hoboes' awareness of American cultural debates in an era that saw what the historian David Shi has called a “veritable nature craze.”Footnote 55 In a 1914 letter to his friend Sam Murray, written from a Salt Lake City jail, the Wobbly bard Joe Hill casually referenced Joe Knowles, a man who achieved celebrity status the previous year with a survivalist stunt (probably faked) of living in the Maine woods for eight weeks with no clothes or tools of any kind. Hill called Knowles “the Nature Freak” and commented that “the simple life … might be all right for a while … but I am afraid a fellow would get ‘simple’ of getting too much of the simple life.” In subsequent letters to Murray, however, Hill wrote of feeling “a little homesick when you mention that ‘little cabin in the hills’ stuff.” By June of 1915, after many months in jail, Hill declared, “I would like to get a little of that close to nature stuff myself for a couple of months in order to regain a little vitality.” Such statements show that hoboes like Hill were aware of and engaged with the “back to nature” trends of the day, even when they mocked extreme examples such as Joe Knowles.Footnote 56
Other references demonstrate an explicit critique of the idea that only middle- and upper-class Americans possessed the capacity to truly appreciate nature. In a story by Ralph Winstead, his character Tightline Johnson complained that he did not understand why people wrote about nature “when there it is, right in front of a feller in real life, if only he goes out and looks at it.” Writers should focus on “conditions and organization and things that are important, and let people that are interested in nature-lovin' go out and get their nature first hand.”Footnote 57 In another story, Winstead's tale of Johnson's stint as a logging gypo in the Olympic Mountains juxtaposed nature and labor. Johnson grew to increasingly admire the scenery until, in his own words, “finally it got so that it appealed to me more than even the buckin' did though I admit that was sure fascinatin'.” With no small amount of irony, he added, “It certainly was wonderful to get away up on the mountain side and look down on the riggin' crew a sweatin' and strainin' like little ants down in the valley.”Footnote 58 In these fictional narratives representing the point of view of an IWW organizer and worker, itinerant workers were not only capable of admiring scenic environments but, in fact, experienced nature more directly than did the middle-class enthusiasts who wrote books about it. The enjoyment of scenic nature was explicitly contrasted with the hard physical labor of work on a logging crew—the story did not mention the physical exertion necessary to climb to a vantage point high on the mountain—but Johnson could clearly “know” nature both through labor and through leisure and contemplation, itself an appealing transgression against the work that he “should” be doing.
Moments of appreciation of nature recur in tramp narratives with sufficient regularity to indicate that even these men whose working lives focused on hard physical labor in industries that commodified nature participated in the prevailing cultural trend of seeking peace and enlightenment in sublime nature. Knowing nature through labor and knowing nature through contemplation did not prove mutually exclusive among itinerant laborers in the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although nature could present hardships, it also offered an alternative to the dangers and indignities of work. In this, hoboes seemingly differed from urban and rural Oregon workers, who opposed efforts to set aside scenic nature for recreation on grounds that such preservation served only elites. This changed when the spread of the automobile allowed more workers to become active users of natural areas in the 1920s.Footnote 59 Hoboes expressed a different class critique, perhaps because of their personal experiences of time spent in nature, in asserting that they, too, appreciated nature. Their sojourns in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and the golden hills of California were not only idle recreation but also an escape from brutal work and living conditions while employed.
Nature on the Job
Although itinerant laborers were industrial workers, this certainly did not imply that their work was divorced from nature. In fact, much of their labor took place in resource extraction industries in which they engaged in hard, dangerous labor in the outdoors. As Montrie notes, “how work was done, why it was done, and to what end mattered a great deal” when it came to people's relationship with nature through labor.Footnote 60 Hoboes' writings about work expressed a mixture of pride in its physicality and awareness of its risks. They asserted their expertise one moment and denounced the alienation of short-term wage labor under brutal conditions the next. These contradictions reflected an attempt to make sense of changing economic and material conditions and negotiate the transition to a modern, industrial world.
Descriptions of work highlighted its hard, physical nature and its demands on both body and soul, but men's ideas about work also revealed pride in their status as workers or producers. Wyckoff observed that among working-class men “only that is ‘work’ which bring your hands into immediate contact with the materials of production in their making from the raw or in their transportation.”Footnote 61 This definition emphasized not only direct bodily contact with the materials of production, but also granted resource extraction, processing, and transportation jobs privileged status as “real work.” The form of labor and the type of industry both mattered. Even Jack London, who sought to escape this world of labor first as a tramp and later as a writer, recognized its power. He wrote of bringing “the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife” into the lives of two women who offered him breakfast in exchange for his stories. To prove his “claim” to charity, London “scratched their soft palms with the callous of my own palms—the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles.” London's words emphasized bodily contact and bodily changes, the smell of sweat and the callouses earned “by toil performed,” as markers of work.Footnote 62 In keeping with producerist tradition, status and authority came from rough, physical labor, in contrast to more effete occupations, and that status as a worker marked men's bodies.Footnote 63
Contact with nature while on the job did not only occur in the form of calloused hands meeting raw materials of production. Living conditions offered little protection from the elements and often left workers with a feeling of dehumanization. Swift suggested that employers saw dairy workers as no more than “good, faithful, indescribable beasts of burden,” due none of the comforts expected for a human being. The workers slept in the cattle shed “with all its cattle companionship and smells.”Footnote 64 Perkins, too, felt that “a hired man is but a domestic animal in this Western country” and described sleeping in the barn on a ranch where he worked for a few weeks in 1898.Footnote 65 In 1914, Mills described only a thin veneer of humanity in a lumber camp: “Three times a day we come in to feed. Unwashed, most of us, we pour in: animals we come to satisfy an animal desire.” The camp had no toilets; workers used the hillsides. The cold was constant.Footnote 66 Similarly, Edward A. Brown of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing observed that, before 1913, labor camp operators in California saw workers as seeking only “a place in which they could be fed,” with shelter not even perceived to be essential. Brown's choice of language—the men needed a place to be fed like animals, not a place to eat like civilized people—implied the dehumanization of itinerant workers by employers, and he went on to castigate the camp operators for “ignorance of what was due a human being.”Footnote 67
Itinerant workers used their mobility as a means of negotiating with employers and protesting uncomfortable and dangerous working and living conditions.Footnote 68 Elmer Enderlin, who worked in fifty-eight different mines over sixty years, attributed his longevity in part to his policy of avoiding dangerous or wet conditions. “I would quit whenever it didn't look good to me,” he remembered. “Several of them I quit the first shift.”Footnote 69 Hobo songs also recognized the hazards of their jobs, as shown in the following verse by Bill Quirke:
The environmental historian Andrew Isenberg has called logging the most dangerous job in nineteenth-century America, and mining must have been a contender for that dubious title, as well. Colorado coal mines averaged 6.81 fatalities per year per thousand workers from 1884 to 1912.Footnote 71 Even seemingly safer industries such as agriculture could pose dangers for workers. A student investigator sent to work on a ranch reported, “I was sent down well-pits, 100 feet in depth, in mud up to my waist, to examine leaks. On windy days I was sent to the tops of old windmills about 50 feet in height.”Footnote 72 The hazards of these jobs came from a combination of environmental conditions, technological developments, and industrial capitalist imperatives.
Even when laborers were not at risk of death or serious injury, their accounts of work emphasized the hard physical labor of the jobs available to itinerant workers. Perkins observed that “none of these jobs are sinecures, and if there was anything soft about them, I would never get one.” Looking at the bright side, he euphemistically noted that “men all keep in good condition on a threshing outfit.”Footnote 73 O'Connor also wrote of how “every bone and joint ached” after nine and a half hours of work in a Southern California lumberyard. After his first day, “Oregon pine and redwood filled my dreams that night—shingles, slabs, clapboards, scantlings, beams, planks, were there in dire profusion.” With his gloves worn through and his fingers sore, O'Connor began “killing time” more than he worked and was fired before noon on his third day on the job. After deductions for room and board, he received $2.70 for his labors.Footnote 74 O'Connor's description of his dream demonstrates the ways in which even mind-numbing, back-breaking work stayed with the men, giving them an understanding of work processes and the natural resources that they handled—or, from another perspective, haunting even their dreams.
As dreams of lumber imply, for all that they were perceived and treated as interchangeable unskilled laborers, itinerant laborers developed expertise as workers. Articles in Railway Age Gazette emphasized the knowledge that hoboes accumulated through multiple stints at railroad construction and repair, even going so far as to state that experienced hoboes were “liable to have a better knowledge of track work than the foreman in charge.”Footnote 75 Another article noted, perhaps euphemistically, that the hobo was “familiar with all branches of a railway, from the train service to the detective department,” but also that, “while he works the hobo is unsurpassed as a track man.”Footnote 76 Hoboes might be reluctant workers, but they often possessed real expertise at jobs that were not always as “unskilled” as their classifications suggested.
Expertise could be a mixed blessing, however, and another Tightline Johnson story by Ralph Winstead emphasized that being a valued employee in a dangerous industry offered no protection. As a young man working in a lead smelter in Coeur d'Alenes, Johnson met Andy Anderson, an old Swede who “knew charges.” His knowledge was such that “the smell of the smoke told him more than a chemist would ever find out,” but this knowledge was hard earned. Anderson had been poisoned by extended exposure to lead; his hands were so damaged that one functioned only as a hook while the other had the use of three fingers. Despite his disabilities, Anderson was such a valuable worker that “the company wanted to keep him,” and he remained on the job until he died there, his body burning in the company furnace. In Winstead's words, “so at last the company got back even the lead that had been eatin' into Andy's bones and playin' tag thru [sic] Andy's veins.”Footnote 77 The story thus highlighted not only the dangers of the job but also the reality that a worker ultimately gained nothing by developing his knowledge of work processes and the nature involved. Through his tale, Winstead warned his readers that their employers looked out for profits rather than workers' health and safety, demonstrating a surprising sophistication about industrial hazards in the process. For Tightline Johnson, the solution was to join the IWW.
Both stories and personal experience ensured that hoboes were cognizant of the precarious conditions of their lives, and if they forgot, both nature and work would soon remind them. Charles H. Forster, a pastor who spent time among northern California hoboes, described a night in their camp in which nature's harshness, “the pelt of the rain, the roar of the river below us, and the shriek of the storm,” accompanied the men's reflections on death after a young Italian worker had been killed by a falling rock and swept away by the river. The men expressed “bitterness and pessimism” at the risks they took with little chance of gain.Footnote 78 The experience of work was at best a bittersweet one for itinerant laborers. They might take pride in their expertise, physical strength, and hard work, but they also experienced dehumanizing conditions both while working and in the living quarters available on the job. They did gain knowledge of nature through their work in industries extracting the West's wealth of resources, but they quickly realized that their places as the “hands” or muscle of industrial society offered very real hazards and little hope of advancement. As a result, some of them took advantage of their mobility to turn to nature as a source of solace and escape. Nature, like organizing, could offer a hope of redemption for itinerant workers buffeted by both economic and environmental forces.Footnote 79
Drawing on broader cultural discourses about the benefits of time spent in nature, at least some hoboes embraced a modern (if flawed) sensibility of nature as a place offering an escape from both work and industrial society as a whole. They constructed their interludes of travel and stolen moments during the workday as encounters with nature in both its harshness and its beauty. Their perception of nature was more complicated than the recreational nature of the middle- and upper-class nature craze—it was a place of brutal cold as well as sublime mountain views—but their descriptions clearly reflected engagement with contemporary discourse that valued time spent in natural settings as conducive to both mental and physical health. In keeping with their class awareness, Winstead and other hobo writers inverted the prevailing view that only middle- and upper-class Americans possessed the capacity to appreciate nature. In their pursuit of leisure in nature, hoboes presaged a shift that took place among the broader working classes beginning in the 1920s as the automobile democratized access to nature recreation. Ironically, itinerant laborers' marginal status and their willingness to risk exploiting railroads for free travel allowed them greater mobility than more settled workers, and they joined members of the privileged classes in tramping the landscapes of the West.
The promise of nature for itinerant laborers echoed in another of Tightline Johnson's lines: “Mountains and valleys with clear tumblin' river and misty clouds hangin' half way up can sure wipe out the memory of a lot of squalid misery found in more civilized section.” He added that, “Somehow they make a fellow feel that life is big and not exactly centered about himself.”Footnote 80 For all the hardships that nature could impose on hoboes, it could also offer hope and a sense of life beyond the work camp or lodging house. As Brazier indignantly noted when he declared that migratory workers “have a concept of beauty too,” their experiences of hard labor did not dull workers' appreciation of the beauty of the American West. Nature seemed to offer some hope of redemption, whether temporary or lasting, for itinerant laborers seeking alternatives to lives of unremitting labor.
