When the railroad stretched its steel rails across the American West in the 1870s, it opened up a vast expanse of territory with very few people but enormous agricultural potential: a second Western frontier, the garden West. Agriculture quickly followed the railroads, making way for Kansas wheat and Colorado sugar beets and Washington apples. With this new agriculture came an unavoidable need for harvest workers-for hands to pick the apples, cotton, oranges, and hops; to pull and top the sugar beets; to fill the trays with raisin grapes and apricots; to stack the wheat bundles in shocks to be pitched into the maw of the threshing machine. These were not the year-round hired hands but transients who would show up to harvest the crop and then leave when the work was finished. Variously called bindlestiffs, fruit tramps, hoboes, and bums, these men-and women and children-were vital to the creation of the West and its economy. Amazingly, it is an aspect of Western history that has never been told. In Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West, the award-winning historian Mark Wyman beautifully captures the lives of these workers. Exhaustively researched and highly original, this narrative history is a detailed, deeply sympathetic portrait of the lives of these hoboes, as well as a fresh look at the settling and development of the American West.
"Vivid, accessible prose . . . Wyman colorfully describes the rough camaraderie among hobos riding the rails and sharing their scant food in outdoor 'jungles,' the only accommodations available to transients so distrusted by settled folks that any hobo venturing into a town was likely to be jailed as a vagrant. Later chapters stirringly cover the battles fought by the radical Industrial Workers of
Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times
"Eye-opening, even for students and scholars familiar with the history of hoboes in agriculture from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s . . . Hoboes moves ahead with energy and clarity. There are wonderful anecdotes throughout."
Jonah Raskin, San Francisco Chronicle
"Mark Wyman has written the prehistory of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Murrow's Harvest of Shame, and Cesar Chavez's La Causa. Hoboes presents a gripping alternative history of the development of the American West."
