Ridin’ on the gunnels,
On the way to Montreal.
Hobo song
It is a slow, slithering drive from Klamath Falls, itself at an elevation of 4,105 feet, up to the crown slopes of the 8,500 feet Quarter Butte Mountain in the High Cascades. This part of Oregon has perhaps the world’s thickest stand of Ponderosa pine. The fifteen-mile climb is up steep, coiling shale roads, at first beside lakes of stabbing blue fished by pelicans, then between crags where cougar and the bald-headed eagle live. It is wild country but by no means deserted, for down that ruckled track there is heavy traffic of colossal thundering articulated trucks piled with chain-buckled logs for the valley saw mills.
This timber stand is one of the summer ‘shows’ of the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company (the winter snows close it down and work shifts to lower, more accessible zones) whose 610,000 acres stretch 120 miles across. Logging is not the freebooting trade it was forty years ago when the companies slashed bare swathes through the United States, and when the lumberjack - inevitably a single man ‘batched-up’ in remote and primitive camps - fought bitterly with management for better conditions and the right to unionize. Now, even though he may have to commute in a crew bus 120 miles each way daily between site and base, he can live in the community. Even so logging is still seasonal and migratory, and among the men now working on Quarter Butte are many who were drifting through the passes looking for a summer job or just a quick grub-stake.
The location of this day’s operations is betrayed by a fog of dust floating through the white firs and cedars. With a grinding roar each massive trunk is being yanked by cable and winch down through the secondary growth to a clearing where the knot-bumpers trim off stubs before a caterpillar-mounted grab hoists it in iron pincers aboard the trailer. It is another twenty-minute climb on foot to the tree-fallers - they ‘fall’ a tree - themselves. Their position is signalled by the erratic shrieking of an electric saw. They work in teams of two, each cutting three trees in turn.
Under their metal helmets the faces of J. W. Scoggins and Dallas Chalfant are masked with a paste of sweat and red dust. They squat to talk on the bole of a hundred-foot Douglas fir which has just toppled to their saw, clean, without touching another tree.
Chalfant: ‘I got in just today. As a matter of fact, I’m Oregon-born, at Prineville, 180 miles north of here. My father had fallen timber but I went to try out at accountancy up in Sun Valley but, well, I guess it’s in the family and I went back to falling.
‘After the war it was on a gyppo basis, on piece rates, and you could make more money. I floated around the Idaho woods, just speculating, seeing what there was. That’s ruggeder country than here, higher and steeper. Last time I was falling near Boise but then the outfit moved away up the Payette River and that meant batching. I’m married and I didn’t especially want to spend the evenings playing dominoes and poker.
‘So I pulled out of there and looked around Bend, in central Oregon, then heard they were wanting hands down here.
‘I suppose loggers are a pretty footloose lot, always have been, but you have to go where the timber is, you know. Now the saw-dust savages down at the plant doing the pulping and milling, they’re another breed of cats, but I myself like being out in the woods and maybe trying a new territory once in a while. I feel that’s where I belong though it is a rough life.’
‘It’s a rough life all right,’ agrees J. W. (he was christened J. W., the initials of his two grandfathers) Scoggins. ‘Last winter we were cutting in seven feet of snow. I came up from Arkansas. My dad was a logger, but I didn’t neither go straight into it.
‘I drove a truck for a time. I covered this country from coast to coast, trips from Los Angeles to Chicago or to Seattle or to Philadelphia. You drove eight hours, rested twelve - you pulled off the highway and slept in the little cubicle behind the cab.
‘Sometimes feel I drive nearly as much on this job. Last spring I was commuting 200 miles a day by car. It always happens -the timber’s cleared around a town and the shows get further and further away. But I don’t leave home if I can help it, you betcha, boy. It used to be come and go, you know, and the woodsmen had no anchor at all, so maybe it’s a change for the betterment.
‘Yet there’s still a lot of loggers work just long enough to get up a grub stake and then go off on a binge. It’s really true, there’s a different breed of men in logging. There’s less brute force now and more knowledge of machinery needed but it’s still harder work than most jobs. That’s okay because the way I see it, you’re a freer man.’
*
The innovation of the railroad in the late 1820s was a loophole a multitude was becoming used to: the shipping out of tough labour into distances and places few could imaginatively measure or locate, living a cruelly hard, misogamic life in secular monasteries of company hutment or caboose.
As the line bored onward, the recruits got farther from what had been briefly home, with always another branch line or loop system to side-step to when the present one finished. They suffered the ‘growing pains’ Thistlethwaite refers to when looking at the great changes between 1820 and 1850. ‘The unplanned haphazard expansion went ahead too fast… Many of this literally dislocated generation, without familiar landmarks, lost the sense of identity and direction … Many succumbed to the violence and solitude of the frontier which abounded with shiftless drifters and strange, broken characters, flotsam on the turbulent flood of change.’
The canal fever was a faint flush compared to the galloping contagion which cheap steel - the basis of the railroad age -loosed. By the outbreak of the Civil War there was a skeleton gridiron East of the Alleghenies and a flimsy link with the Middle West. By 1860 30,000 miles of track were down. The decade of 1880-90 packed in the most headlong growth in the history of American railroads: 70,300 miles were added, more than 7,000 each year. The hot pace slackened off after the 1890s, but by 1916 every state, nearly every county and every city and sizeable town was served by one or more railroads, and was served by daily trains to and from all parts of the country. There was business out there. Between 1860 and 1910 the number of farms increased from two to six million, and 500 million acres were brought under cultivation: an area about the size of Western Europe.
The rail mileage had proliferated to 193,346 by the end of the century, and rose to 254,000 (its peak: the luxuriant iron vine has withered since) - all that free travel for a man with pliant bones and a readiness to take the rough without any smooth.
But long before that, by the 1860s, those names which are a plainsong of American dimensions and power - Rock Island; the Louisa; the Nashville and Chattanooga; the Chicago, Milwaukee, St Paul and Pacific; the North Western; the Southern; the Texas and Pacific; the Peoria and Oquawka; the Illinois Central; the Atchison and Topeka; the Hannibal and St Joseph - emblazoned the thousands who rode into Arcadia.
Those early tracks probed into a frontier life which was decaying before it was callow, and the engineer was the new cavalier to supersede the horse-riders. From the start the railroads clanged with romance: they were ‘the links of that endless chain that was to bind the States in love together’. (The love sonnet is still in the language of even the businessmen of railroad management. In 1966, after being appointed to rehabilitate the ailing Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, Lou Menk declared that the aim of the line was to write more of ‘the poetry of the railroad - a nice long freight train’.) The huge soot-belching contraptions with their cowcatchers and funnels like mill chimneys, and their headlights striping the prairies, threw their sparks abidingly into the American imagination. For the train has remained an arrow, the line out and yet at the same time the umbilical cord coiling back across stupendous spaces to a home and kin lost from sight.
To a foreigner - to this one, at least - hearing an American locomotive sounding through the darkness of, say Nebraska or New Mexico, never fails to cause a bewildering moment of expectation that a ship is hoving up. For that hoarse bellow resembles not the re
edy shrill of an English train but the sirens heard at a river mouth or through dockland fog. Yet it fits - fits on these great interior seas of earth, and perhaps the feeling in the blues, is probably as akin to sea fever as can be known by land-locked Vikings.
I see a train coming down the railroad track
Love to hear the bark of that old smokestack
and
I hate to hear that freight train blow boo-hoó!
‘Cos every time I hear it, feel like riding too
The ‘dream world’ which the railroads created for boys of his generation has been recalled by Holbrook, quoting a boyhood friend who had set out ‘for that magic country to which all passing trains went’ and worked for forty years on the rails.
‘Boys didn’t go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did,’ he said. ‘What fetched them were the sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I’ve heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.’
The whistle of a locomotive on those new lines was a signal to all within earshot, even out of sight of it across the white pine hills and the blueberry swamps, that America was all of one piece. It was a telegraph message across exciting distances to dwellers in a perfunctory loneliness. They listened and read the code of the engineer’s quill and knew which train was racing by.
The whistle’s call was one to which millions of Americans responded in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the railroad immediately bloomed with an aurora of bucko deeds which the staid system in built-over Britain never acquired, despite Kipling’s attempt to whip it up with the claim that ‘romance brought up the nine-fifteen’.
Indeed long before, when the train was still the splendour of Britain’s industrial age, Matthew Arnold had seen more accurately that it merely carried its passengers from a ‘dismal and illiberal life’ in one factory hell-hole to the same life in another factory hell-hole. Actually, a surprising number of English nineteenth-century poets - apart, that is, from Scotland’s own William Mc-Gonagall and his The Newport Railway - did turn their attention to the snorting marvel: not only wrathfully, as Wordsworth in The Kendal and Windermere Railway and W. E. Henley in Journey By Train, but many such as Rossetti, Landor and William Cosmo Monkhouse were rapturously moved by this black and crimson dragon at large in England’s tame acres. There was the determinedly ‘modern’ attitude expressed by Charles Mackay in 1846:
‘No poetry in Railways !’ foolish thought
Of a dull brain, to no fine music wrought.
Yet, like the later ‘keen/Unpassioned beauty of a great machine’ of Rupert Brooke and ‘strict beauty of locomotive’ of Auden, these were poets reacting sensitively to the concussive onrush of ‘unconquer’d steam’, and indeed the railway came to be cosily incorporated by John Betjeman in nostalgic runs on the ‘Early Electric’ through ‘autumn-scented Middlesex again’. But in Britain the railway was superimposed upon settled communities; in America the railroads were the ligaments of a strengthening nation, and the ordinary people felt this poetically and expressed it in their own crude poetry.
In practical terms the migrants and settlers and prospecting busiressmen and traders and adventurers and recruited yeomen climbed aboard and saw for the first time what really did lie where either the Great Desert or the Land of Milk and Honey was supposed to be. And one man who was then coming into existence as a passenger the railroad companies hadn’t foreseen and certainly didn’t want, but who was going to bestow his own private legend and lore upon the railroad, was the free-rider of the steamcars later to be known as the hobo.
As far as I know the first printed report of snagging a ride - to become the de rigueur mode of travel for the hobo - appears in Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives, published in 1878, a work of vibrantly pious tone by Allan Pinkerton, founder of the company private detective system, who was loathed by every working man and radical.
There was a popular song sung with savage emotionalism in every industrial town, Father Was Killed by the Pinkerton Men. The motto of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was ‘We never sleep’ and its trademark was an open left eye (‘eye sinister’) which gave birth to the term private eye. The word fink - meaning a scab, strike breaker, company spy or other variety of rat and stoolpigeon - is also said to derive from Pinkerton and its contraction to pink, dating from the 1892 Homestead strike.
The Pinkertons wore military-style blouses and slouch hats -that is, when they were in uniform. For the Pinkertons also operated as undercover operatives, spies infiltrating unions and strike committees.
After its founding at mid-century the agency participated in seventy major industrial disputes, always on the management side. Its 2,000 trained active men and 30,000 reserve totalled more than the standing army of the nation. They were, in truth, an army: a private army available to any corporation or individual factory offering a fee for the smashing of a union or the suppression of a strike.
They were armed. They killed. After the Homestead scandal, in which dozens died and hundreds were wounded, eight states enacted mild anti-Pinkerton statutes, and Populist-controlled Colorado withdrew the Pinkerton’s Denver licence. Yet overall little was done to curb the Pinkerton finks, and they continued to appear, predictable as blue-bottles on bad meat, wherever workers had to be taught not to be uppity.
It is therefore not excessively surprising that the Father of the Private Eyes, in his 1878 account of his own exemplary ascent from immigrant guttersnipe to four-square prosperous patriot, should see the tramp from the commanding heights of establishment service as a bit of the rubble, and rabble, at the bottom.
Here is the first recorded observation of a hobo in situ: ‘During the passage of the fast train sent from New York to San Francisco, by Jarrett and Palmer in ‘77, a tramp boarded the train at Cheyenne, climbed to the top of the coach and enjoyed hugely his elegant and rapid manner of making his journey until Sherman was reached. At that point the engineer got a glimpse of him and he at once began throwing a heavy shower of cinders and increased the speed to the utmost power of the engine … The cinders burned into his clothes, cut his arms and legs and face.’ After cleaving for his life to the rocketing coach, smouldering the while, ‘at Green River he was let down more dead than alive and his hair had turned grey and he looked more like an old man of sixty than a lad of nineteen as he was.’
There is one reference to an even earlier pioneer hobo. In a 1912 broadsheet The Curse of Tramp Life by ‘A No. 1,’ California Dan says: ‘Have you heard that old “Omaha Bill”, you know the “Old Timer”, who back in the Sixties beat the first train the Union Pacific sent West across the plains, has found his end?’ (A freight had side-swiped Omaha Bill as he dozed on a sleeper near Fargo.) Tenuous hearsay, but there is no reason to doubt that an enterprising hobo vanguard had already begun nailing rattlers by then.
Certainly during the decade following Pinkerton’s incident a throng of like-minded must have decided to take the weight off their feet and risk instant grey hair, for the clandestine passenger had become a problem familiar enough to support a dramatic drawing by A. B. Frost in The American Railway in 1888. It shows a staunch, upright brakeman, fists raised in Queensberry mien, confronting two tramps to whom he has been giving the bum’s rush. They are clearly very ugly characters, wearing not only expressions of snarling venom, but ragged clothes, too. One is pulling a knife, the other brandishing a cudgel. Fortunately for the brakie, a fellow shack is running along the catwalk on the roof of the adjacent freight train to lend a hand.
Pinkerton provided the first description in the annals of a jungle, a tramps’ camp. At about the same period as that jolly anecdote about the barbecued hobo, one of his agents ‘in pursuance of his duty at Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania’, during an 1877 strike, when the Pinkerton squads were busily beating up troublesome pit workers, ‘suddenly came upon a bivouac of tramps near a coal-shaft’ deserted by the d
own-tooled miners.
Pinkerton gives this camp fire soiree the sinister air of a coven celebrating Black Mass. ‘This grotesque company numbered thirty or forty persons,’ he relates. ‘They were cooking their supper at the edge of the timber, among the rocky bluffs and overreaching protecting trees. The moon, rising above the lonesome scene, fell across the camp, giving its inmates a weird, witch-like appearance. They seemed to be a tired, dreary, wretched lot, and had the marks of travelling and weary wandering upon them. Most of them had fallen upon the ground for rest and in all sorts of sluggish positions were dozing in a stupid, sodden way that told of brutish instincts and experience.’
Nowhere in Pinkerton’s book is the word hobo used. Quite evidently at this time the hobo had been neither observed with interest nor distinguished from the other tattered casualties on the industrial battlefield. The certain origins and etymology of the word seem untraceable, but plenty of explanations have been offered. Ben Benson (‘The Coast Kid’) in his 1942 pamphlet repeats authoritatively the dubious claim first advanced in The Bugle, a sheet proselytizing ‘Marxian Socialism’ among the unemployed and spasmodically published in the early Twenties from Oklahoma City, that hobo comes from the Latin homo bonus meaning good man. Benson clinches this with: ‘A real Hobo is a migratory worker - most of the Pioneers in this country were hoboes.’
Elsewhere it has been suggested that the word was a concer-tinaing of a standard greeting: ‘Ho, Boy!’ That might seem, in the laconic American idiom, to ring with improbable Falstaffian heartiness. Minehan passes on another idea. In his Lonesome Road he has one old bum give his young hero this somewhat pedantic explanation: ‘It’s a contraction for “Hello, Brother”. Later they shortened it to “Lo bro”. Well, they sort of changed that to “lo bo”, and then because “lo bo” sounds like saying “low” they just said “o bo”. Most persons like to bring out their o’s good and strong so somebody added an h, and it became hobo, meaning a man who travels and works.’
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