Hard Travellin Read online

  ‘I know what it is, from personal experience to be the tramp journeyman; to carry the stick and bundle; to seek work and not get it; and to get it, and receive but a pittance for it, or suddenly lose it altogether and be compelled to resume the weary search.’

  Having established his first-hand knowledge of bottom-doggery, he plunges into panegyric of ‘the careless, happy-hearted order, richer, and more satisfied, than some men worth their millions’. He describes the miseries of overcrowded transport, and proceeds: ‘No person can ever get a taste of the genuine pleasure of the road and not feel in some feckless way… that he would like to become some sort of tramp … an irrepressible impulse to go a-tramping.’

  There is the ‘physical and mental elevation of spirit which comes to the walker’. To ‘the better class of tramp … what a perfect panorama of beauty is opened, what miles of smooth road, or crisp, half-trod grass-paths, are covered, what dallyings by moss-grown bridges where the sunlit waters ripple along with soft murmurs below, what meetings there are with sturdy old farmers on hay-ricks, in ramshackle buggies, on horseback, or afoot… What sly flirtations with blooming country lasses, arguments with cautious housewives, explanations to vigilant constables, and chattings with Rip Van Winkles at roadside inns, what quaint villages are reached.’

  Alas, there is a seamy side to the idyll. ‘But of tener you get the vagabond. Shiftlessness, discontent, restlessness, all creep in and take possession of him … from this stage it is but a step to a bullying mendicant; and from that condition to one of becoming a criminal…’

  Nevertheless, says Pinkerton, he disagrees with a certain Professor Wayland ‘as to the universal villainy and ferocity of the tramp’. He continues: ‘I feel that they have been somewhat misunderstood and always scorned and vilified. While wishing it thoroughly known that I deplore and condemn the vicious features of the fraternity, I am quite willing to have it known that I have a kind word to say for thousands of them who have become homeless wretches and wandering outcasts.’

  Pinkerton particularizes. He has a kind word to say for Walter Scott, for Dr Johnson, for John Bunyan and, indeed for Jesus Christ. He points out - ‘with no levity or sense or irreverence’ - that Christ was himself a tramp; moreover, the Bible is ‘full of illustrious instances of tramping’.

  The fact is, ‘the tramp has always existed in some form or other, and he will continue on his wanderings until the end of time’. In Switzerland and France there are tramp tailors, tramp cobblers, tramp tinkers, all carrying their awls and hammers and soldering irons about the countryside. Even dress-makers and midwives, he amplifies, have been part of that careless, happy-hearted order, wending their way from bust to bust, pregnancy to pregnancy.

  There are, too, tramp printers such as ‘the noted tramp-printer’.

  Peter B. Lee, who ‘met his death by attempting to board a train and steal a ride. He had been a man of a good deal of independence of character, and had never before made an effort of this kind. Nearly his last words were: “Served me right for goin’ back on principle!” ‘

  Pinkerton clearly agrees that it served him right but presents Peter B. Lee as the kind of unobtrusive, untroublesome tramp who would never have tangled with Pinkerton’s ‘extensive and perfected’ force. Grieving for the passing of Lee’s breed, Pinkerton examines the decline in tramp standards: ‘… the severe and unprecedented hard times that have lately been experienced, and which still seem to girdle the entire globe, have manufactured tramps with an alarming rapidity. Where they previously existed as single wandering vagabonds, they now have increased until they travel in herds, and through the dire necessity of their pitiable condition, justly created some anxiety and alarm…

  ‘The conditions which have always existed in our country, and which still exist, have made it imperative on the part of a large portion of our population to tramp it. Men leaving Eastern cities for Western towns, desiring to economize, have pushed their way along afoot… Farmers of great wealth with a view to changing their residence, have walked hundreds of miles to see the country and make personal enquiries and investigations; but the hard times which we have experienced have so depressed our own industries that thousands of mechanics, clerks and laboring men have been thrown out of employment here.

  ‘Our late war created thousands of tramps. This fact seems to be generally overlooked. Why did the war do this? Because hundreds upon hundreds became demoralized by the lazy habits of camp-life, and were suddenly turned loose upon society without any regular employment, or desire for any.’

  Here Pinkerton relapses into tender ruminations about ‘old knights of the road’ he has met and the ‘Freemasonry of tramping … When brighter days return to our industries, people will see tramps disappear … the thousands among them who have trades and professions will gradually but surely return to them. But during this period, when the hard hand of necessity bears down so heavily alike upon businessman and workingman … there should be a more general leniency toward a class who are made up of people often as good as we; and some charity should be exercised, rather than a relentless war inaugurated, and result of which will only be to reclaim no one of them, and rapidly increase crime and criminals.’

  Enough, Pinkerton apparently decided at this point, just as one might have begun to suspect a Lady Bountiful behind the unblinking private eye mask. He seems to realize that he has gone almost too scandalously far toward siding with the knights of the road, for then comes that familiar schizoid swerve away from sympathetic analysis into obeisance to the laissez faire open economy, from the Homeric to the plain man.

  First he wants it known that it is his conviction ‘as certain as life itself, that the workingman is never the gainer’ from being corrupted by unionism and strike action. He is always the loser.

  ‘These trades-unions of every name and nature are but a relic of the old despotic days. The necessities for their creation, if they ever existed, have passed away. In American citizens there exists all the essentials to make success in the life of every man not only possible but probable.’

  In ‘the big scare at Louisville’ Pinkerton’s hawk eye perceived, ‘there was not a railroad man, or a respectable mechanic. Its members were merely Negroes, half-grown boys, tramps and cowardly thieves … vile rabble’. On another occasion of industrial unrest, although this time there was a ‘small percentage of thoughtless and inconsiderate workmen’, among the mob were ‘howling communists, vicious tramps, mischievous boys and idle city riff-raff’. The Trainmen’s Union had been broken up by Pinkerton men armed with guns and clubs - for it was well known that the troublemakers ‘are confirmed tramps, disgusting drunkards, miserable communistic outcasts or are now occupying the gloomy cell of some jail’.

  Stating proudly that ‘my agencies have been busily employed by the great railway, manufacturing and other corporations, for the purposes of bringing the leaders and instigators of the dark deeds of those days to the punishment they so richly deserve’, Pinkerton vows juicily: ‘Hundreds have been punished. Hundreds more will be punished.’

  It may be seen how simply, how positively, the tramp could at one and the same time be the happy, jolly dog and the disgusting, drunken, miserable communistic outcast. In fact what precisely was the man behind the apoplexy and the clichés ?

  14 Father, fix the blinds so the bums can’t ride

  Do you know how a hobo feels?

  Life is a series of dirty deals.

  This is the song of the wheels.

  Hobo song

  A freight train comes rumbling into the Rock Island yards at Little Rock. The boxcars and gondolas and flatcars are emblazoned with a litany of distance and random possibility: Route of the Eagles; Texas-Pacific; Burlington Route - Everywhere West; Fruit Growers’ Express; Nickel Plate Road; Eerie Lackawanna; Soo Line; Sante Fe All the Way.

  Four men who have vaulted out of a boxcar as the train slowed into the approach walk down the track beside the water tank tower and out of the road crossing on to C
onfederate Street, where there is the Pig Stand Bar-B-Q drive-in and Lucille’s Coffee House. An electric arrow indicates LIQUOR on one side of the street; opposite an even bigger sign declares JESUS SAVES.

  The four men, on this occasion, choose salvation and book in at the Rescue Mission, and they carry their bundles down to the bull-pen, a basement made of cinder blocks with wood bunks divided by wire netting to prevent after-dark fraternization or filching.

  There is a central space with benches; a group is playing dominoes; one man is having his hair machined down to bristles with an electric clipper. Most wear striped engineer caps or track layers’ canvas caps with tie-up ear muffs and one has on a silver crash helmet: badges of artisan respectability and status otherwise lost. They are middle-aged to elderly, most of them exrailroad men, now contraband passengers on the lines they used to operate.

  ‘I used to be a freight loader up in Chicago. There used to be two million men working for the railroads, now there’re 700,000. Now I just kinda odd-job around. Guess I’ve travelled 50,000 miles in the last three years.’

  ‘I was born in Bauxite, Arkansas, and my father was a brakeman on the Rock Island Line. All I wanted to do was move away off like him, I wanted to be a railroad man like my daddy, and I was. I became a fireman and went all over Missouri and the South. Man, that was a good job.’

  ‘Well, it’s all manner of things that gets you into this life. With some it’s cocaine or marijuana or just wine. With me it was women and now I’m too old for that even.’

  ‘One reason a lot of guys travel so much is that they roll into a boxcar drunk in Philadelphia and wake up in Portland and find they’ve rode right across the United States.’

  ‘I’m sixty-two now. Used to be a welder, mostly on construction sites and oilfields. But mostly all I get to do now is follow the crops. I just been picking soya beans. Reckon by now I must’ve made forty-six states.’

  ‘I just got in from Nebraska. I was up there with a steel gang on the railroad. We laid a quarter-mile of steel at one time. Now I’ve heard they’re going to start laying and repairing track up in Wyoming in September so I may as well head up there.’

  ‘The men who ride the trains don’t bum. They’re looking for work. There are more men on the road than ever. I was in Denver and there were hundreds walking the streets. Me, I’ve just been working a combine in Texas. I’m from North Carolina, but I haven’t been back there in years. Why did I leave? I couldn’t tell you that to save my life.’

  ‘I ride because I have to. There’s no kicks in it. I’m too old to work and not old enough for the pension. I was in Illinois picking strawberries in May, but I didn’t stay because the peaches was all froze out. I can’t figure out the next move.’

  ‘Well, it’s kinda funny but I like riding them freight trains. Yes sir, it’s just in some people. You want to travel on. Some people just got that roamin’ blood in them.’

  *

  Let us look more closely at the hobo and his manner of life, when still geared absolutely to the railroad and the outpost work areas it served up to the Twenties.

  The floating proletarian of the West of this period usually Lad a basic trade. He was a transient trackman, the ra lroad section hand who laid the lines and was called a gandy dancer from the incongruous ballet movements he made as he levered the sections into position and smoothed the gravel, a choreography exquisitely formalized by Southern Negro gangs into a group effort timed to work chants and hollers.

  He was a sheep shearer, furiously busy - and highly paid - for four months as the wool harvest shifted from curve to curve through the South-West. He was a sewer hog who dug ditches, roadbeds and construction excavations. He was a timber beast, a saw mill worker or a logger who could traverse a river-borne raft of trunks and who followed the clear-felling through the North borderland to the Puget Sound.

  He was a harvest stiff who threshed his way from the ‘headed wheat country’ of Southern Kansas to the ‘bundle country’ of Nebraska. He was a metal miner or a coal miner or a rock-breaking dynoe or a fence erector or a fruit canner.

  But no matter what his original trade or training had been, to sustain himself he had to be a jack-of-all-works, a handyman able, according to season and province, to drive a mule team, fall a pine, shock wheat, dam a river, grade a railroad embankment, chop cotton, brand a calf, spike a rail, rope a steer, glaum soft fruit and knock apples, flick a gandy dancer’s crowbar, use a banjo shovel and a tamping pick, harvest ice for the reefers or refrigerator cars on the fruit trains, and, of course, to panhandle for food and money between times.

  Essentially, too, he had to have a polymathic knowledge of the railroad, the lay-out and interlockings of the systems, and the anatomy of the train itself. Many of them had this knowledge professionally, for yet another category of hobo was the boomer, a word originally loosely applied to the nesters, squatters, homesteaders and Western land-rush settlers in the 1880s, but which narrowed down to a railroad term, meaning most often a freelance brakeman or fireman, cast off in the bloody labour clashes of the 1880s and 1890s, and who, blacklisted, boomed around under assumed names.

  A million railroaders were thus set afloat in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and slid into nomadism. There was another huge retrenchment in the Thirties: in 1936 the American railroads employed 1,066,000 workers, 57.4 per cent of a decade earlier. The boomer developed into what was probably the nearest equivalent to the British tramping artisan, for, like him, the boomer’s precious passport to the working world was his paid-up union membership. ‘What ya ridin’ on?’ was a shack’s routine greeting to a freighting hobo, meaning Railway Union or IWW card - if neither, the trip was likely to end at that point, overboard.

  Wherever he wandered his card, flashed to an engineer or conductor, his employed brothers, was his season ticket for a free lift; it was also his ‘pie card’, his meal ticket, for it could be counted on to produce a roof to sleep under and shared grub from the clan. It did not necessarily get him a job if he had been involved in a strike or sacked for drunkenness.

  If drunkenness was on his record (and it was the custom for railroaders to kit-up with a bottle of red-eye hooch until Rule G forbade consumption of liquor on duty) some unions circulated the name in their monthly journals, a practice which perhaps ought to be approved in the interests of public safety (one thinks of the old silent movie caption: ‘Through the night roars the overland express, a crazed engineer in the cab’). Blacklisting meant for the tippler a one-way ticket to Palookaville and little hope of getting his mitts on the controls of any train better than a crackerbarrel short-line.

  But drink was far from the only reason for blackballing. If a man had been prominent in the 1894 Pullman strike the letter of reference with which the General Managers’ Association had in law to furnish him was likely to be (although this was not discovered for nearly a year after the strike) on a sheet of paper with the watermark of a broken-necked crane. Rank and file strikers, or men shifting ground for other reasons, got a reference bearing the watermark with the crane’s head erect and were eligible for consideration up the line; but if the head drooped - no job.

  Boycotting drove boomers high up the tracks to ‘the Indian Valley line’, the railroaders’ Shangri La where was said to be the fabled ‘pike’ (short coal or fish line) offering superlative pay. In fact, Indian Valley was likely to be in comfortless country on the railhead frontier, up in Montana, the feeder branches in the Dakotas, the Sevier Valley line through the hostile Ute Indian territory of Colorado on its way to San Francisco, or the drive across the flatlands of Nebraska where competing companies fought with thugs and guns to be in first. More often than not he found himself able to get employment only on the ‘jawbone’ lines serving the Montana mining camps - named so because up there all the shantymen, dynoes, muckers and teamoes got was jawbone pay: tobacco, food and scrip for the company store, but no hard cash.

  Or the boomer rolled around in the thick of the seasonal scrambles
, when no one had time to check papers, and the urgency was to rush the wheat and vegetables Eastward. If there was no time to follow up references, or a man said he had ‘lost’ them, the yardmaster’s test was to tell him to hold up his hands. Fingers missing, he got the job - few seasoned railroaders kept all ten when freight cars were manually coupled with link-and-pin.

  Between harvests and the short-lived races to mesh new tracks, the boomer hoboed. He was, anyway, an artefact of the railroad, both his host and his enemy, and his reckless, choppy, violent personality was forged by those very same qualities in railroading itself. With the railroad he stayed, as a semi-outlawed supernumerary, hopelessly attached in an unrequited love affair.

  The boomer carried a roll, or ‘bindle’ or ‘balloon’, of usually, inevitably, lousy blankets; but then so did bindle stiffs at large. Every logger and reaper and construction man was, in Ashleigh’s words, ‘compelled to follow literally the advice of the founder of Christianity and “take up his bed and walk” ’ The drawing of a stiff pouring petrol on his flaming cord-bound pack - ‘All “bindles” will be burned on May the First 1918’ - was the emotional focus of the iww’s poster campaign for better bunk-house conditions.

  While being miles short of uniformed, the hobo worker tended assertively to hallmark himself: the harvester’s corduroy breeches and high-crowned J. B. hat; the lumberjack’s gaudy mackinaw, tan tarpaulin overalls and spike-soled corks; the hop-picker’s high-front climb-ins; the ranch hand’s riveted Levi Strauss pants; the carpenter’s white bibbed overalls; the ironworker’s brown overalls; the boomer’s thousand-mile shirt of black sateen, subject to no whiteness window-test in those pre-drip-dry days. And among them, in any old scarecrow rig, was the general purpose hobo, navvy or ganger for any job going.