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Transience, Labor, and Nature: Itinerant Workers in the American West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2014

Joanna Dyl
Joanna Dyl*
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
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Abstract

This article focuses on the tens of thousands of itinerant workers, also known as tramps or hoboes, who provided the primary labor force for the natural resource extraction industries of the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Itinerant workers' visceral encounters with nature differed from the experiences of most urban residents in this era of city growth and related anxiety about Americans' loss of contact with the natural world. This article argues that 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.

Type
Environment and Labor
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 85 , Spring 2014 , pp. 97 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

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References

NOTES

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20. Both contemporary observers and historians have perceived hoboes as distinct both culturally and socially from these “non-white” workers as well as from local “white” workers who did not engage in the same patterns of labor mobility. For the diversity of agricultural workforces in the West during this period, see Wyman, Hoboes, who suggests that these distinctions were somewhat artificial for harvest laborers. For a discussion of female transients, see Lynn Weiner, “Sisters of the Road: Women Transients and Tramps,” in Walking to Work, 171–88.

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64. Swift, What a Tramp Learns in California, 22.

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68. Thomas Andrews notes this phenomenon among workers passing through the Colorado coal fields. Andrews, Killing for Coal, 121. Reformers and employers worried about how to keep men on the job. For example, see Solenberger, One Thousand Homeless Men, 150–54.

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70. Reprinted in Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices, 68.

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