Underground: Hobo Life on the Rails

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Towards the end of the 19th century, a great migration of men, disillusioned with their prospects at home, took to the rails under the wide western sky in search of a new life in America’s dusty frontier. By the 1930s, with the Great Depression in full swing, the hobo subculture had become a prominent aspect of life in the American West, with an estimated 700,000 men living the vagabond lifestyle: hopping freight trains from city to city, looking for work or food or both and living life according to a strict, formal ethical code.

Rule #1: Decide your own life, don’t let another person run you.

Hobos, essentially migrant workers, were often illiterate, and developed a system of simple signs, easily scrawled in chalk, to provide essential information to anyone else riding the rails. It’s a language of immediate needs – food, shelter, danger – depicted in lines and circles and arrows. The impermanence of the chalk glyphs reflected the fluctuating nature of the hobo lifestyle: never more than passing through, fortune or despair lurking at every turn.

 

Rule #6: Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.

Because they were shunned by most of society, the hobos’ message system had to appear meaningless to a casual viewer. Signs broadcasting safe camping areas and hospitable homeowners appear as childish doodles to the uninitiated. Yet the simplicity of the geometric forms lends an element of aesthetic purity to the strictly utilitarian graffiti. Instructions could be as simple as “Get Out Fast,” depicted as two arrows taking flight from the center of a perfect circle. Or they could be as nuanced as “Doctor Here Who Won’t Charge You,” a cross with a face drawn in the top right corner. The bare-bones construction of thoughts and instructions nevertheless preserves a strong emotional component. You can almost feel the great rust-colored landscape, the clanking percussion of the train, the smell of dust and grease and the knowledge that every day is brand new.

Rule #15: Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.

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